We saw this Friday and thought it was pretty good.
The ending was perfect - by destroying himself, he allowed the kid to grow up “normal” and not become the evil force behind the changes. Although I will admit that kid had the makings of a pretty evil force, even if mommy does raise him right…
Yeah - lots of nitpicks, but you kind of have to leave reality check at the door when watching a film about time travel.
There’s only two timelines. Young Joe didn’t die when he fell. They just stopped the story at that point and then retold the beginning of the second timeline from Old Joe’s point of view.
ETA: I am still wondering about the question I posed above. If Old Joe died immediately in the first timeline and the ending reveals that Old Joe created the Rainmaker, how does the Rainmaker exist in the first timeline? It doesn’t make sense.
I think the idea is that the Rainmaker would have come about anyway, if Young Joe hadn’t had a positive impact on him and Sarah (plus, all that silver must have helped).
I was kind of hoping that the works of the Rainmaker would actually be a huge misunderstanding. Like from the point of view of all the Loopers and the mob, he was going scorched earth, killing everyone and everything. But in actuality, he was using his power to eliminate the mafia in total and bring order and eventual justice to the cities.
In the original timeline Young Joe killed Old Joe and went on to become Bruce Willis in China. In this timeline the Rainmaker was there causing havoc and killing loopers. As Young Joe had killed Old Joe, Old Joe wasn’t running around 2044 to kill Emily Blunt. Which means that Cid became The Rainmaker without having anything to do with Old Joe.
I left the cinema sure that Cid would become a badun’ no matter what Young Joe did. But I like the idea that Young Joe could have shot his hand off to stop Old Joe. Which was a nice callback to him writing Beatrix’s name on his arm when he could have written Jen’s. As someone else pointed out upthread.
I really enjoyed the film.
I couldn’t figure out how he would have become the Rainmaker the first time around if we’re supposed to believe he won’t after young Joe kills himself. The above resolves it for me. Additionally, before the climactic incident with old Joe, his mom’s only way of dealing with Cid’s rage was to run from him. That probably wouldn’t have been effective in the long run. Old Joe’s actions forced her to confront it.
That was the only potential plot hole that was holding me back. With that squared away I think the movie’s great.
It’s a classic Western plot: gunslinger shows up at a isolated, troubled homestead and confronts an older, more dangerous gunslinger (who is often quite similar to him). The young gunslinger defeats the old one, redeems himself, and transforms the homesteaders’ lives. As I mentioned before, it’s not that different from Shane.
But there were still rumors that the Rainmaker had a synthetic jaw and that his mother had been killed, which seems to imply that Joe was partly responsible for his creation. And if that were true then it makes sense for him to be eliminating the whole Looper business, since it was a Looper that killed his mother.
I didn’t realize until I left the theater that my interpretation couldn’t be correct since Old Joe never had anything to do with him in the original timeline.
I assumed that there are multiple timelines or more likely the rumors are the result of the cloudiness or whatever that’s caused by somebody going back in time and messing around with things.
I just realized that the movie did imply that with Cid’s jaw being grazed by the bullet he probably still would have ended up with a synthetic jaw. I think that’s the main reason there was the line about the fields being filled with germs. And regardless, I thought that was a very weird line.
Just saw it, enjoyed it, although maybe not quite as much as I’d hoped from all the buildup and positive reviews.
A few things that seemed left open to me:
(a) how did Sarah know about loopers?
(b) was it just a coincidence that Sarah and friendly whore’s babies were born on the same day in the same hospital? If so, it seems like quite a reach
© I also agree that the basic “looper” time travel premise makes absolutely 100% zero sense. But that’s OK.
(d) I thought the scene where Bruce Willis escapes being tied up and kills all the bad guys who already had guns and were already alert was pretty clumsily done.
(e) What’s the reference that someone thought they spotted to The Fifth Element?
Here’s a thought:
Sid’s mom knows about loopers. She also says that, when Sid was born, her lifestyle didn’t really allow for her to raise a kid. And we never find out who Sid’s dad was. So, my guess is that Sid’s dad was a looper, or possibly a gat man, or some how involved in the criminal underworld surrounding looping. In the “original” timeline, where old
Joe never escaped, Sid’s dad finds out about him (or his mom) and comes poking for him/her. He ends up killing the mom, which sets Sid off on his rampage thirty years later. But this future is rendered impossible, because old Joe murdered everyone in the looper organization. So, in effect, both versions of Joe are responsible for saving Sid and his mom - old Joe by killing the original looper, and young Joe by killing himself.
As an aside, how many people do you suppose the mob sent back after their operation was wiped out, and there was no one there to kill them anymore?
I liked it. It was an interesting, original premise that was well acted and explored. Regarding complaints about plot holes: it’s a time travel movie, you check your disbelief at the door. With movies like these, you just have to accept the rules as offered and not let the massive plot holes impair your enjoyment. The universe basically ran on Terminator rules with a bit of high speed Back to the Future thrown in there.
I guess that in the original time line, Cid turned out bad because his mother was unequipped to raise him properly. I mean, how do you instill boundaries and ethics into a kid who knows he can kill you with a thought? I figured that he ended up killing his mother in a similar fashion as he did his aunt, and grew up with godlike powers and a ton of emotional baggage. That doesn’t explain the grudge against loopers, though.
With regard to the question of why they don’t send the condemned back farther than thirty years: I got the impression that the time machine just performed a fixed “minus thirty years” displacement. When Young Joe is unknowingly waiting for Old Joe, the scheduled time passes and he suspects that something is wrong. The delay is necessary to build dramatic tension, but an easy fanwank is that it was because Old Joe has freed himself and killed his captors. If the time machine was programmed for 5/12/44 11:30 AM, then Old Joe would have shown up on time despite the time he spent breaking free.
During the “original time line montage” Old Joe is shown to have hair similar to Zorg from The Fifth Element (bald on one side, emo on the other).
Does that particular version of the mob, or in fact the time machine itself, exist without Sid?
I like your theory about Sid’s dad being a looper. It crossed my mind for a second that Sarah herself was a looper.
I was distracted by the mom’s duvet and pillows. We have the same design bought at IKEA:D
Anyway, was there some symbolism with her chopping the tree stump?
I have also been wondering if they intended to imply that Sid invented time travel in the first place because his tech prowess at that young an age certainly suggested it to me.
My first impression was that Sid’s mom was someone sent back from the future to protect him after his real mother died, which would explain how she knew about loopers. I also thought it was going to be revealed that Sid was the guy who invented time travel (since he was obviously much more intelligent than a kid his age should’ve been), and possibly that time travel was ultimately the reason 30% of the population has TK.
None of that turned out, of course.
I think assuming Cid invented time travel makes a certain amount of sense plot wise. He invents it, somehow encourages the mob to set up the looper program, then uses the loopers in the past to execute everyone he needs to in his rise to power. But isn’t he supposed to be so powerful that he can ignore the government/not worry about getting caught murdering people? If not, what’s so bad about a world where he becomes the Rainmaker?
Also, I haven’t been able to find a translation of the news feed that mentions the Rainmaker towards the end of Old Joe’s time in China. Anyone have that yet?
Sure, if the mob had something cool like time travel, I can’t believe they would waste it on body disposal. But I was sorta willing to accept that on faith. Maybe outside of the ambit of the movie they were doing other stuff with it.
But more significantly - some of the stuff that happens isn’t really explainable (other than by sheer perversity). Why, in the case of the first looper who failed to close his loop,
[spoiler] does the Mob, once they get ahold of his younger self, carve bits off him to force his older self to come in (and be killed)? We know that if you kill the younger self, the older self just disappears! Much simpler solution.
Also, it is plenty clear by the end that the younger self was never going to meet the babe in China. The older self’s memories ought to reflect that. In fact, the older self ought to remember wanting very much to save the boy from growing up bad … or in fact not have been sent back at all, assuming the boy didn’t grow up bad!
But of course, the movie could not exist without those sort of paradoxes … [/spoiler]
Malthus- for your first question, it was stated that killing the younger looper was sort of a last resort, because it would result in 30 years of paradoxes (or something like that).
However, it bugged me that they started lopping parts off. How’d the older looper get to where he was if his legs had been cut off thirty years before? And why was he wearing pants? Seems to me that would cause more paradoxes than just killing the younger version.
I also was wondering if they meant to imply the Mobs actually controlled the cities in the future. At one point it looked like a cop car was a part of the group of goons hunting the two Joes.