See, I don’t buy that attitude, but if it works for you, cool.
Spoilers Ahead.
I liked it a fair bit. I was a little disappointed that it went from the large canvas of the city and the disintegrating world to the very small and intimate farmhouse, but it helped me realize that something I really love in a film or novel is a well-realized world with a lot of depth. Realizing that was nice and enjoyable, and I don’t hold it against the movie that it isn’t concerned with the bigger world presented in the first 20 minutes.
It’s problematic, the movie. The portrayal of women is pretty silly, having the trifecta represented without a deviation or interesting wrinkle. There’s a Whore, a Goddess/Saint (Old Joe’s savior-wife), and a Mother. It’s fucking boring and sad that the women can’t even pass the more-complex-than-ancient-archetype test (much less the Bechdel Test), and this fact left a sour taste in my mouth and was the biggest complaint I had with the movie. Give us some interesting women with a perspective, goddammit, or leave 'em out.
I loved that Old Joe kills a kid. It’s hardcore and awesome, and made me respect the commitment to values the filmmakers have; they’re not afraid to shrink from the consequences of their story. (though they’ll kill a little boy, and NOT a little girl; more sexism, or convenience in favor of running time?)
There were a couple amazing moments. My favorite small one was when the mom tackles JOE, not the kid, and in a fraction of a second I went from ‘yeah yeah saving the kid’ to ‘OH FUCK’ as it became apparent the kid was gonna unleash hell. An awesome little moment that could be forgotten in the power of the next one, a second later, when the guy starts to erupt and the voiceover goes ‘the rainmaker’. It’s a totally thrilling moment of dramatic cohesion, as various ideas and promises in the script come together, and even if we’ve already ‘figured out’ the kid is the Rainmaker (not like it was that hard), it’s a great moment of drama. The other amazing visual was the kid rising from the ground as the grass and dirt levitated around them all, and his face says ‘you’re fucked’. It’s a perfect Moment of Badassness, and it doesn’t matter that it’s straight out of several dozen anime films and shows I’ve already seen. It’s awesome.
Overall I thought the movie was worthwhile and satisfying because it did well what it set out to do. My companions were disappointed that it didn’t deliver on the broad canvas suggested by the first 30 minutes, which I respect. But I think it did a good job of telling exactly the story it wanted to.
And one last thing. I thought it would have been awesome if, at the end, Young Joe had his realization (about how Old Joe would kill the mother and the kid would go on to become the Rainmaker) and that realization had been remembered by Old Joe a second later, causing him to put down the pistol and give up his selfish hope for a better life. A major theme was redemption, and this would have redeemed them both at the same time (because Old Joe was just as selfish as he accuses Young Joe of being). The only problem with this is that it creates huge causality problems; If Old Joe doesn’t create the Rainmaker, the Rainmaker can never take over the criminal syndicates, causing them to try to close all the loops, so Old Joe would never have been sent back in time…time travel mindfuck goodnight.
Oh, yeah, one super last thing. The sequence where the guy’s body parts disappear as he races to his own death was the best, most horrifying sequences I’ve ever seen. It’s amazing for it’s understatement and pace. Totally horrifying and great.
you have a good point and the outcome we got was not the one i expected. what i expected was to see him affected in the same way as old Seth because that was established as what the consequences would be of physical changes to younger selves
i will grant you that it is annoying
unfortunately as it stands, we’ll all be speculating until the cows come home since the movie’s timeline is so far all that exists for an official source of information. i did think that whoever slapped together that ruleset had come closer than anyone else to making sense of whatever happened in Looper, because otherwise it’s a movie about something that never happened
a movie about nothing
seinfeld the movie
I’m not trying to be petulant. The movie either hand waves the minutiae of time travel or it doesn’t. If it does, then OK, I won’t think about how the Seth mutilations are impossible, or how young Joe killing himself undoes the narrative or how silly it is that body disposal is impossible in the future or that bigger things could be done w time travel that preclude petty syndicate hits.
However it better then give me a reason to care about the characters. Some stake as to why I care what happens to these people or the world they live in. The film failed at that task, so all I’m left w/ is bad sci-fi. It did have Emily Blount, so it wasn’t entirely without value. The scene with the vault was also pretty great.
I love this thread. I was hoping this would happen.
I don’t have anything to say, other than agreeing with mono that the safe scene was great (and disagreeing with him on everything else in his post) and with what DoomMunky says about that tackling moment. Damn I loved that so much. What I love about that safe scene is how it pays off. I also love how I was listening to some podcast, might have been Fresh Air, and the critic on that talked about her being forced to “tuck herself into a steel cabinet.” Uhhhh.
Anyway. Great stuff in this thread folks. So I thought I’d post a picture that I found pleasing.
-xtien
“It’s the little ones that get you.”
MORE SPOILER CONVO
Except, if you die your timeline stops. Bits were being lopped off Old Seth because Young Seth was, gulp, still alive while he was being worked on.
When Young Joe killed himself, Old Joe never made it to the age he is when he’s zapped back to Young Joe’s time.
I can’t remember which character in the film said it but someone explained what happens when your younger self dies, your older self vanishes like they were never here.
If you’re saying the difference between Seth and Joe is that Young Joe died and Young Seth was just mutilated, that’s a really goofy thing for time travel to hinge on, for the reasons I tried to state above.
It seems logical from—I can’t believe I’m typing this—“the way time travel normally works” that if young you dies, old you might disappear (both “from the future” and from the present that he’s travelled back to). But in connecting those events, we understandably gloss over why. It’s not strictly your state of being alive or dead that’s removing your future self, it’s that because you are dead, you could not go on to do the things your future self does to get him to this point. I know, it’s stupidly obvious to say it that way, but you have to look at it that way if you want to apply past-cause/future-effect logically across the board.
And when applied that way, specifically to the case of Seth, young Seth having his legs cut off, while not totally eliminating old Seth, should still just as quickly make old Seth disappear. Not from every future, he could survive, even be sent back to have his loop closed in a wheel chair, but he should have vanished from a world where moments ago he was climbing a fence. Not because he was alive or dead, but because if you have no legs, he could not go on to do the things old Seth does to get him to this point.
I don’t remember a character specifically saying that if young Joe dies, old Joe vanishes, but I might have just missed it. That would mean Seth didn’t behave consistently with the rules of time travel. As I said above, I’ve decided it’s the opposite, that time travel doesn’t quite work the way you suggest, that Seth is the way it should be, and Joe vanishing is just a small inconsistency in the name of a dramatic conclusion.
Yeah. The moment they started dismembering Seth, they should have created some bizarre time loop. Because A) Old Seth would never have been ported back and escaped if he had no legs. so B) Young Seth never would have let his older self escape. ergo C) Young Seth would never have been captured and tortured, so D) Old Seth would come back and escape, thus E) Young Seth would get captured and tortured, ergo go back to step A). ad infinitum.
The ‘logic’ about old/young selves sharing a time lime prevents such bizarre occurrences is contrived and arbitrary. This movie has no valid rules. That’s fine, but as I said earlier, and Dingus’ disagreement notwithstanding, there wasn’t much left for me to care about within the whirlwind of meaningless TK/Syndicate/nonsensical time-travel plot points.
I think it does have valid rules, it’s just on this one point that they don’t match up. I can elaborate on what I think of the rest of the rules later, but I’ve already typed far more via iPhone this morning than is comfortable.
If they’re not consistent, they’re meaningless. Not to mention, the film told us not to worry about them.
And with bolded emphasis no less. You’re a better mobile
user than I’ll ever be!
Actually, I thought the movie’s internal time-travel logic worked out well for explaining everything except how the Rainmaker exists in Bruce Willis’s initial timeline. (The one where he meets his wife.) In the article above, even Rian seems to suggest this one is broken and requires a leap of faith.
As for the rest of it, though, the key to understanding it is how Bruce Willis’s memory works. It’s a cloud of probability which only resolves itself as the present unfolds. Basically, the past cannot be changed but the future can. If you travel back in time, you inherit that time stream’s attributes so your past is mutable because it is still in the future from your new timeline’s perspective.
Looking at the carving on the arm as an example. It’s not there when Willis arrives in JGL’s timeline and he has no memory of his arm being carved. The second JGL carves into his arm, however, Willis’s memory and body are altered. The alteration is not retroactive to Willis’s arrival in the timeline because that is in JGL’s past and, accordingly, already set in stone. Basically, the present is the dividing line between what is mutable and what is not.
This diagram illustrates this well but is slightly inaccurate:
Anything in green cannot be changed but anything in red can. Willis’s past is mostly in red so it can be changed. Anything between the point Willis arrived in the timeline and the present, however, is set in stone. As the line of the present moves forward, events become locked in stone. Taking another example, Willis drives the truck full of silver out to the farm before JGL shoots himself. The second JGL shoots himself, Willis ceases to exist in this timeline because JGL is affecting the future of his timeline. The truck is still there (and everyone Willis killed is still dead) because JGL can’t change his own past.
The diagram above is not accurate because Willis actually comes from a different timeline and joins JGL’s timeline. This is a more accurate diagram:
The only thing this doesn’t explain is the presence of The Rainmaker is Willis’s initial time line but Rian himself admits that this one requires a leap of faith. I’m willing to make that leap and I really liked the movie a lot. (Perhaps the Rainmaker is inevitable and a different looper was responsible for him in that timeline.)
This assumes only one time stream. When we see two different versions of Willis’s arrival in the past, that’s a tip-off that there are multiple time-streams.
You cannot travel back to your own time stream because it’s already set in stone. When you travel back in time you’re going to an alternate timeline. You become a person out of time’s normal laws. Your past is still in the future and so it is a cloud of probability, subject to change.
IMHO the ‘inheriting this time streams attributes’ business is a pretty bogus supposition that only exists for narrative purposes. That gets into the arranging straw diagrams aspect. I don’t really think delving into the time travel logic warrants extended scrutiny.
Shane Carruth, who wrote Primer, was the consultant for the time travel logic in this movie which should tell us that a lot of thought went into this. People are bitching that it doesn’t make sense. I think it makes perfect sense.
I love the arranging straw diagrams quote because Willis is right – For the purposes of enjoying the movie, you don’t need to break down the time-travel logic but it is fun to do so after the fact.
You can’t have it both ways though. If you want to bitch that the logic doesn’t make any sense you can’t then dismiss explanations of the logic as bogus supposition. Everything I wrote is supported by the movie’s internal logic.
When discussing time travel, I don’t see how one can call anything bogus with any amount of authority.
You’re right. I disagree, but I’ll let it drop.
So, what you want is for Old Joe to just drop dead. But the difference between Seth and Joe is that there is the assumption that Young Seth still becomes Old Seth. Young Joe, however, doesn’t become Old Joe anymore. So, where as Young Seth losing a foot results in an Old Seth who lost a foot, Young Joe dying results in, at best, a corpse that’s been decaying for 30 years or a pile of ash to blow away on the wind. It is impossible for Young Joe dying to result in a dead Old Joe.
Yeah basically. I find the movie’s internal logic holds if old Joe had dropped dead in the field at the moment young Joe shot himself and you can buy the idea that the Rainmaker would have come into being in the original timeline due to other similar events happening off camera (perhaps any timeline not involving Joe getting actively involved and reuniting Cid with his mother would have resulted in the Rainmaker taking charge).
Cid was a pretty f’d up kid and it took him making first a human connection to Joe, then doing something horrible and having Joe forgive him, and then a life or death situation which forced his mother to overcome her fear of him and recreate a bond of love between them.
Aside from that, everything can be explained as time travel resulting in there being a mental and physical link between two versions of the same individual sharing a timeline that causes changes to one to immediately affect the other. I assume they had old Joe disappear simply because that’s what people not thinking too heavily on the subject would probably have expected to happen, so it might confuse folks right at the ending if he had just dropped where he stood.
I was disappointed with the movie, but it wasn’t a bad movie. It was pretty good acting. Even if i can dismiss the somewhat implausible explanation of time travel, the explanation for it was just a let down. The end result, the twist if you will, mah tired of prodigy kids as a tie to bring everything together.
this is generally where i stand because i liked the movie enough not to get hung up on time travel, and trust that consulting the mind behind Primer must mean that there can’t be many oversights in Looper
i also like that people have found enough evidence to diagram and propose theories that support the movie’s logic, which means other people are doing the thinking for me (like bruce willis tells the audience in the diner scene) and i can suspend my belief easier for the movie to play out in a dramatic fashion as it did
there’s no defense for akira jr. though, as much as i enjoyed that kid’s performance