Looper - Discussion thread(open spoilers)

Cafe Society
181

We saw that some loopers had second thoughts when their future self arrived. So you have to figure that a much higher percentage had second thoughts when it came time to be sent back to be killed. I imagine virtually all of them tried to resist by running or hiding or fighting. So I don’t see how the future mob could count on always sending a looper back on a timetable - there must have been times when last minute problems caused a few days of delay. (And every looper knew exactly down to the second when he was sent back to be killed and then had thirty years to make plans about how he was going to respond when they came to get him.)

And keep in mind that most of the people being sent back weren’t loopers. They were the regular non-looper victims of the future mob. There had to be unexpected situations that arose that required them to get rid of somebody without advance notice. Holding on to them for a day or two while they sent back a message would have inevitably caused problems.

Think about The Godfather, for example. Suppose instead of trying to kill Vito Corleone or Sonny or Luca Brassi or Paulie or Captain McCluskey, you had to try to kidnap them and lock them up for twenty-four hours before killing them. In every case, that twenty four window would tip off the victim’s organization that a murder was being planned - while leaving that organization twenty four hours to counter-attack and rescue the intended victim or grab a hostage of their own.

182

This is really a pivotal moment as it leads to the 1st time Cid uses his TK (though not willingly its seem more because of anger) THIS CAN BE VIEWED AS SUPER IMPORTANT TO THE 1st TIMELINE.

There is so much packed in here, this is my take:

They are doing multiplication tables, Sara who will be the positive influence in his life repeatedly tries to tell him THE RIGHT ANSWER which is 24 (Like making the right and CLEARLY CORRECT decisions in life).

But he won’t listen, he remains stubborn and explodes calling her a LIAR. He really doesn’t seem to trust her at all. He won’t even call her mom…This would lead to the 1ST Timeline occurring where Cid becomes Rainmaker regardless of Joe because he grows up always mistrusting his mother.
And yes the numbers themselves do seem to be important if you take 8 being an double loop and 3 different timelines.

Very interesting.

Also something stupid and random to note, but in a good film every single shot and angle has meaning:

When Cid kills Jesse he is sitting at the BOTTOM of the stairs. He is so young this could be looked at the beginning of his “reign” and thus he is just beginning his “climb/ascent” (up the stairs) but in life as well.

183

From what I’ve read, it looks to be the Magnum Research BFR.

184

Nonsense.

185

Did anyone else notice the sign “La Belle Aurore” on Abe’s building? That was the Paris bar where Bogie and Bergman fell in love in the flashback in* Casablanca*.

186

Saw it last night, pretty good.

People are asking why you’d have the young looper kill their old selves? Who else are you gonna have do it? If I’m Pete, and Looper Tom kills future Pete, why wouldn’t I just kill Tom? I’m scott free, at least for a while, no?

And there’s no reason to think that it was Old Joe who originally “made” the Rainmaker. All they know is that he’s a mysterious mob boss. All that other stuff is rumor (though apparently true?).

Amusingly, Old Joe wanted Young Joe to go to China since it was where “he” would be going. If he’d pushed France, maybe none of it would have happened (except the Rainmaker).

I agree that the TK was unneeded as a plot device, and that some of the time travel stuff could have used more tightening.

187

The Loopers know the precise instant they’ll be sent back to, but not the precise instant they’ll be sent back from. Even if we assume that the time machine can only work over a fixed interval (there’s nothing in the movie to indicate this) there’s no reason to assume that the loopers would know that. The time machine hasn’t been invented yet, and loopers in general are a bunch of low-level schmucks who aren’t even trusted to handle a gun more accurate than those crude blunderbusses.

As I recall, Old Joe even has a line that goes something like, “There’s a new guy who’s closing all the loops,” which indicates that Joe at least thought that there was some wiggle room in how long you were allowed to live after leaving the game. Otherwise, it wouldn’t matter who was in charge: all the loops would be closed at the same time, regardless of who was in charge. The Rainmaker’s takeover wouldn’t accelerate the process at all.

Those are, indeed, problems that could arise under a system of kidnapping someone, holding them for a day to set up their hit in the past, and then popping them into a time machine. There are also problems with garroting someone and dumping their body into the river. That doesn’t stop it from happening.

That said, the “send word back 24 hours ahead of time” strategy isn’t really necessary. When you send Jeff Daniel’s character back in time, you give him a list of the dates and times that every victim is going to appear in the past. He uses that list to hand out assignments to his loopers, who go out and kill the victims. Thirty years later, Jeff Daniels is an old man, and the mob gets its hands on a time machine. Old Jeff Daniels gives the list of arrivals he’s kept in a safe place for three decades to his younger self, and the younger self goes back thirty years, and uses the list to to hand out assignments to his loopers, who go out and kill the victims.

188

I always took that scene as Old Joe warning Young Joe that something really bad was going to happen to France in the next thirty years.

189

It was Abe (Jeff Daniels) who warned Joe not to go to France.

190

I saw the movie not long ago, and really liked it, although my head still hurts a bit from trying to figure out the timelines and paradoxes. (I’m reminded of Capt. Janeway’s comment in ST:VGR “Timeless”: "“My advice in making sense of temporal paradoxes is simple: Don’t even try.”)

I agree it would’ve made much more sense for the mob to assign loopers to kill other loopers, when the time came, rather than to close their own loops - too much potential for slipups/mercy/hesitation/second thoughts otherwise. We see two “loop-closings” go awry - there must have been others.

Nice glimpses of future society - a drug taken through the eye; dystopic American cities; hints of something really bad coming for France; air motorcycles; etc.

I wondered, as I watched, if Cid was actually a really young Joe in another timeline? Young Joe describes his hellish early life to Cid in the tunnel; don’t we later see a tearful Cid on a train, all by himself, just as Young Joe mentioned?

I didn’t get Abe’s line about knowing that Young Joe was setting aside silver and not minding it. Why wouldn’t Young Joe - or any looper - want to build up his savings?

I’m intrigued by the suggestion that the Rainmaker isn’t a murderous mob kingpin after all, but instead someone fighting fire with fire and shutting down the mob in the future. We only hear from other mobsters that the Rainmaker is a psycho; he could just be a very talented and thorough vigilante - Batman without the aversion to actually killing the bad guys.

Yes. From IMDb.com’s Trivia page for Looper: “The incredibly large “Gat” pistols are actual production firearms, and not just a prop created for the film. It is a Magnum Research BFR (Big Frame Revolver) chambered in .45-70 Government, a rifle round originally adopted by the U.S. military in 1873. The BFR weighs roughly 4.5 pounds.”

191

The image of Cid on the train was the future that Joe was “seeing” in front of him if Old Joe killed Cid’s mom. They weren’t memories of events that had happened, just showing what Young Joe envisioned happening, leading him to decide to take his final action.

192

Oops, sorry for the multi-posts… Missed the edit.

I think Abe’s mentioning of the money was just part of the warning to Joe that he was going to lose it all if he didn’t help in turning in his friend.

193

It’s implied that all the loopers are “in the moment” kind of guys who don’t think about the future. That’s what they were hired for. I suppose there could be a problem with the silver since it’s all from the future.

I remember there being a brief shot of a news broadcast with some sort of city destroyed with “Rainmaker” listed underneath.

194

Hmm. I remember the TV news story as being about a mob hit, not an entire city. But for all we know, the mob controls the media in 2074 China, and they’re trying to make the Rainmaker seem a lot worse - and indiscriminate in his violence - than he actually is.

195

Greetings,

I have two questions that I have been posing on various Looper-related boards.

  1. When Joe first meets his future wife, he mouths something that we don’t hear and she then flips him off. What is he saying?

  2. Later on, Joe’s Wife is watching a news report about the Rainmaker. It is spoken entirely in Mandarin. Anyone know what is being said?

196

I don’t know, but I’ll bump this for you.

197

Just watched this and had a few semi-coherent thoughts.

The chop-fest on Seth was to keep him from running away once they had him at the door. At that point they can kill the older one and then the younger one without consequence. But if they chop his feet off now, how does he get there in the first place? Simple- if they do it now, it only happens now. Seth didn’t run around for thirty years with no feet. It only affected him at that moment in the present when it was happening. Seth was removed entirely from the timeline after that so there was no issue. So they basically pursue Seth from timeline A and in the process create timeline B in which they mutilate him and then kill him and in doing so erase him from existence. But doing this never makes his feet disappear in timeline A.

Regarding the Rainmaker, we are led to believe it will be Cid who grows up to be this villain. But the movie doesn’t entirely specify. It could have been that other kid (the dancer’s kid) or it could have been someone we never saw or heard about. The Terminator movies have this same bug/feature- it is possible that the Terminators have been chasing the wrong John Connor all along.

Drugs absorbed through the eyes were a minor plot point in Harley Davidson and the Marlboro Man, a role in which Mickey Rourke does his best Bruce Willis.

I thought the whole Blunderbuss vs. Gat issue was going to amount to something since it is implied that Joe is a shit shot and only hits things because his gun can’t miss at a set distance. But somewhere along the way Joe learns to shoot quite proficiently.

The Loopers kill themselves because they don’t know who the victim is until they get gold instead of silver.

The future bad guys who kill Old Joe’s wife know they can’t get away with murder and that’s why they try burning everything down when they leave.

I loved Garrett Dillahunt at his Terminator-style best here. However, the scene where he shakes down the house was lifted right out of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.

Along the same lines I liked that Sara was cagey about her vulnerability on the farm (my husband will be home any minute!) but she didn’t realize that she tipped the Gat Man off by lying about her son’s age- those aren’t ten-year old toys on the table, genius.

It is possible that Joe’s good intentions were for naught- now that Sara has that big stack of silver bars. she’s really going to be a target for vagrants, who are apparently regular visitors to her farm. So Joe might not have made any difference at all! Maybe (if Cid is the rainmaker) it all goes down because after the events of this movie Sara is robbed and killed by vagrants and that’s what makes Sid so angry at the Loopers.

I do wish they had been a little clearer on Cid. For a moment there I thought he ended up growing up into Joe and that made me wonder if Joe had just recently fucked his own mother. I thought young Joe was trying to kill old Joe who in turn was also being targeted by an Even Older Joe who was the Rainmaker. I know it doesn’t make a ton of sense but there were too many similarities between Joe’s tragic past and Cid’s.

198

Well it’s possible that Cid isn’t the Rainmaker, but the story makes a lot more sense if he is. The reason the Rainmaker hates Loopers is that in the original timeline, Old Joe killed Cid’s mom in the cornfield and he grew up wild and angry, like Joe did. The parallel between young Joe and old Joe is just that, a more or less literary device. Young Joe kills himself in the cornfield to prevent Old Joe from killing Cid’s mom, so that he’ll have a mother to protect and guide him, and won’t grow up to be the Rainmaker as he is known in Joe’s timeline. In fact, the civilizing influence of Old Joe’s wife is another parallel between him and and Cid. And maybe young Joe was willing to kill himself because he knew that he was just going to grow up to be a bitter old man who murders children. There’s also a parallel between Jeff Daniels’ character and young Joe … both attempt to change the directions of young people’s lives in hopes for improvement.

The writer was clearly using the literary device of parallelism in combination with parallel timelines to give his story more impact. Not many scripts out there where they use literary devices that have not become cliches.

199

There is but it’s in the deleted scenes.