Review of Looper (2012) by Beladrim — 30 Sep 2012

Time travel stories are tricky. No matter how much you try to put it all together, there always are loose ends. As good as this Sci-fi story may be, it suffers from this problem. Einstein called this "the time travel paradox". While travelling in the future is concievable through time dilation, traveling in the past is an other story.

In Looper, Old Joe comes back in time to prevent the death of his love. However, Old Joe is a different version of the Young Joe in the movie. Old Joe who actually killed his older self 30 years ago, now escapes from his younger self. This is a time paradox : if old Joe escapes, young Joe will not follow the course of events that leads him to become the old Joe who loses his wife and travel backs in time. The very fact that Old Joe saves himself denies his very existence. The only way the old Joe can exist with altered Young Joe is if we suppose that 2 different versions of our universe can co-existe. If looper sticked to this theory, it would actually make sense. Unfortunately, it doesn't. At some point, you see that everything Young Joe does to himself affect old Joe. If Old Joe is from universe B and Young Joe is from universe A, than whatever Young Joe does to himself is unlikely to affect Old Joe, since they both come from their own universe. However, Old Joe is affected by Young Joe, and can only possible if there can be only one universe that auto-corrects itself. The writter of this story conveniently switches between two VERY opposite theories of time travel to push the story forward.

I'll take the ending as an example to make my point. Old Joe's quest to kill the child version of rainmaker ironically leads him to create the tyran version rainmaker of his own futur. The very one he wanted to change. old Joe nearly fulfills his destiny as he shoot the child rainmaker in the jaw and is about to the mother. Young Joe sees the never ending loop that he must now break. So he takes his own life, detroying Old joes very existence in the process. Does it make sense? Not really... If old Joe very existence disappears, so should every of his actions. He never, came back from the futur, escaped, gave the adress of the barn to young Joe who thus never meets the child version of rainmake and so he never kills himself to save his mother. Yet... the childs jaw is still wounded, and yound Joes body is still there. So how can Old Joe very existence be erased and the consequences of his actions still exist? The ending just dosn't make sense. By killing himself, only two things could have happened : A) Old Joe doesn't disappaer because he is from a different universe in which he killed his older self B) The only one universe either collapse on itself, or "corrects itself". If it does correct itself as the movie suggests at some key points, then at the very moment young Joe killed himself Child rainmaker's wound would disappear, he and his mother would be back in their house enjoying some tea. None of them would remember Young Joe or Old Joe.

I enjoyed the movie, and overall the story is very "enjoyable". I am not saying it's bad, but the way this movie exposes time travel is choppy.