This movie opens soon and I’m dying to go out and see it. With two little kiddos at home, I have no idea when I’ll get a chance to, though. It’s currently at 92% at Rotten Tomatoes and I’m pumped to see it.
Anyone seen it yet? I guess it’s cool if you don’t want to box your spoilers, but perhaps we can wait until at least Sunday or so to start full on blabbing.
I’ll post my review as well when I get a chance. I’m glad to see Bruce Willis doing both Expendables 2 and this. Good year for him so far.
I’m going to try to sneak out and see it Saturday. I love the entire time travel noir idea and it sounds like they pulled it off.
I just recently watched one of the director/writer’s other films, Brick, and thought that was pretty good.
My favorite movies are one’s like Blade Runner, Tweleve Monkeys, Terminator, Children of Men, etc. so I think this will fit right in with them.
Can someone explain how the premise makes sense? From the commercials (so I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here), the mob is apparently using time travel to send people into the past where their assassin kills them. How is that remotely efficient? It’s not like a time machine is any more convenient than throwing the body in the trunk of a Buick. And the guy in the past still has the problem of ditching the body, so it’s not like that embarrassing problem is eliminated. Presumably, they’re still building football stadiums in the future, so wouldn’t it make more sense to bury their bodies under the 50 yard line like they did with Hoffa?
And if you’re going to send someone back in time, why bother with an assassin? Send them back to the time of the Black Death or to the time when the surface of the Earth was bubbling lava.
I don’t care if the premise makes sense (no time travel story will ever truly make sense). I will gladly pay money to watch this and every other film that Joseph Gordon-Leavitt is in. He is superb…and so nice to look at.
Apparently, there is no way to dispose of a body in 2074: tagging and tracing techniques are so sophisticated that there’s no safe way to do it without getting caught. They don’t specify why, but my guess is that it’s probably nanobots. I’ve found that nanobots are usually the reason.
As for why they don’t send them further back, there’s no explanation. Maybe the time machines only goes to 30.
There were a couple of sly references to 12 Monkeys, which was nice. There was even a sly reference to The Fifth Element, which tickled me.
I thought it was a good movie, definitely worth seeing. The best thing about it is how CGI and acting helped Gordon-Levitt look like a young Bruce Willis.
IMHO, the worst thing about it was seeing Piper Perabo topless.
I thought they did a good job of leaving the door open for a sequel, too.
They didn’t want to murder his wife. But since “closing the loop” involves dragging career violent criminals to their own deaths, the teams sent to retrieve them are armed with deadly weapons as a last-ditch measure. Someone on this particular team got startled and fired by mistake; that was what it looked like to me, anyway. Just dumb luck.
One thing I don’t get - why are loopers charged with ending their own loops? Seems like they could avoid a lot of grief (and avoid the expensive Golden Paydays) by just sending loopers back to be killed by someone else.
Overall, I quite liked the movie, but it bothered me that the loopers seemed to be so widely known - a random woman on a farm knew, for Pete’s sake. This seems to defeat the purpose of clandestine murder and body disposal. One also wonders if the invention of the time machine is itself a closed time loop in this universe - research is driven by the proof that it’s possible, provided by the loopers themselves.
[Spoiler] But it makes NO SENSE why the mob would go through SO MUCH trouble of setting up this looper network to murder and then dispose of their targets if a stray bullet killing someone was no big deal. Especially when they keep mentioning how illegal and risky using time travel is period. The fact that this movie didn’t mention the repercussions of killing Joe’s wife in the future took me out of the story, because all I kept thinking was “the mob has access to a time machine and the ONLY thing they use it for is hiding bodies in the past, even though they can still kill people in the future? Why even send them back alive at all?”
Also, I felt like the last third of the movie is where it really lost steam. They replaced Jeff Daniels as who I was sure was The Rainmaker with the creepiest kid on earth and then drop the whole time travel element so that they can do a call back to TK. It was like they had too many ideas and just used all of them a little rather than following through on them.[/spoiler]
I absolutely LOVED every scene which had both Joes together, especially the Diner.
Do tell! I kept thinking about 12 Monkeys, but I couldn’t tell you why.
My Sci-Fi standards are high, and I really liked the movie. And I love how in Bruce Willis’s first discussion with Gordon-Levitt, he said something like “First of all, we’re not going to talk about time travel, or we’ll be here all afternoon trying to figure it out. Time travel is messy.”
I might chime in later, but I’ll make a few brief comments first.
I love Rian Johnson, and the film works very well with regards to his talents - thematically, directorally, characters, noirishness, etc. But the plot strayed a bit away from his particular comfort zone with the time travel stuff, and probably could have used a little bit of touch up from Christopher Nolan for those aspects.
With that in mind, you just have to suspend disbelief and ignore a bunch of plot holes:
[SPOILER]1) If you want your younger self to be OK, give them your gold so no one knows he let you escape.
If you want to avoid the whole looper escape issue, strap a device to them that kills them on arrival, and/or send them to a different looper.
The whole rainmaker plot is dependent on itself. He created his own dark past. In the original timeline he never would have turned evil.
There’s some weirdness with older Joe disappearing, but none of the carnage he created disappearing with him.
How do you get a birthday and hospital code but no name? For that matter, how would his Mom recognize a hospital code?
If they have trouble hiding bodies, why are they so cavalier with deadly weapons, and what are they going to do with his wife’s body now that she’s dead?
[/SPOILER]
There’s a bit of an in-joke/easter egg with regard to France vs Japan:
Originally the future was going to be set in Paris, but it was too expensive to film there, so they went to China instead after getting film investment money to shoot there. So the whole bit about him learning French but then ending up in China instead was a fun wink to those in the know.
I expected the stupid Gat to turn out to be the Mob boss’ younger self - why else would he put up with him? But he did not.
I was pleasantly surprised by the turn the plot took,
away from the issue of the Joes escaping, and towards the whole “let’s kill Hitler” plotline. While it started becoming obvious the kid was the Rainmaker, his technical aptitude also made me wonder first whether he was instead the inventor of time travel.
It seems like these future mobsters could save themselves a lot of grief by killing the guy before they put him in the time machine. Then the looper just becomes a glorified garbage man.
I liked the twist with the TKs, a plot point that thankfully was not revealed in the trailer. I was surprised however,
when the kid turned out to have super TK powers. I thought they were setting him up just so they could reveal that the mom was the super TK the whole time, and she becomes the Rainmaker.
I just got back from seeing this. Honestly, I was a little disappointed, although I see it has gotten generally good reviews, so maybe it just wasn’t to my taste. It was okay, but it felt overly long to me and got kind of scattered in the second half. It did spark some good conversation among the group of friends I went with though, which is always a good result from a movie.
There was one thing I didn’t understand:
After Old Joe showed up in the field, Young Joe shot him in the back and then ran back to his apartment and ended up falling off his balcony. We later see that Old Joe watched him fall and dragged him away. Fair enough. But then there was another scene with Old Joe showing up in the field and Young Joe blowing him away. How did that fit in? I don’t understand how Young Joe could ever have killed Old Joe, it doesn’t seem to fit into the story.
We actually discussed this aspect - basically closing your own loop keeps everything as clean as possible. It sort of makes sense. If another looper killed future you and you found out about it (and they seem to all hang out together and do drugs, so it doesn’t seem unlikely that word would get back), wouldn’t you try to kill him? And if you succeeded, that would mess everything up. Closing your own loop would involve the fewest possible people, so fewer chances for things to go wrong. And most of the time I don’t think you would know you were killing yourself until after the deed was done.
Also, did anyone else think the movie spent a lot of time on that stump without any kind of payoff? I thought for sure her axe skills were gonna mean something.
That scene shows the “original” timeline, if there is such a thing. Young Joe closes the loop, gets the gold, lives it up in China, meets his hot Chinese babe, becomes Old Joe, and gets sent back in time, where this time Young Joe doesn’t kill him.