The reason Sid becomes the Rainmaker is because his mother/her sister was killed in front of him, OR because he never let his mom/aunt influence him to use his powers for good in the original timeline. It is her positive or negative impact changes the history of the world, because when negative Sid uses his powers for evil, and creates a time machine that allows his crime syndicate to transfer stolen money/weapons/etc into the past and eventually take over the world. These timelines are the real ones, but are broken once JGL kills himself, so Bruce Willis never exists to kill Sid’s mother/aunt, AND Sid gets to meet JGL who ultimately has the largest impact on the world’s history by making Sid decide that he will save his aunt/ love her like his true mother. With her positive influence he will learn to use his powers for good. He will still create time travel, but not in a way that any crime syndicate will ever get their hands on.
I feel the only reason time travel is against the law is, because it was not invented by a good person in the first place (Bad Sid). The ending of the movie was Good Sid. He will use his (un)natural abilities and time travel to help the world in innumerable ways.
There is no proof that he does NOT invent the time machine. They never insinuate that someone else invents it, however, they insinuate at least twice that he is at least capable eventually inventing it. The entire "in 30 years time travel will exist and it will be illegal’ is all they say. Not where. Not who. That puts Sid at the age of 40 when he invents it. All they do is show how intelligent he was by dominating Sudoku, and inventing a walkie talkie system using toy frogs as a 10 year old living in a corn field.
Also, I am pretty sure that is his Aunt. She had a twin sister. They made that very clear if you paid attention to her story. His real mom was killed (by Sid on accident I believe JGL makes the connection), and Sid remembers her death (not knowing it was directly his fault) so never ends up trusting his Aunt his entire life (the whole LIAR rant. Becomes the Rainmaker), OR he witnesses his Mom AND Aunt die, then he becomes the Rainmaker.
Using his “power for good” clearly means not killing people with his “TK”, but it also means not using time travel to run a crime syndicate.
…That was long winded. Let me know what you think. Can anyone remember a single instance where they insinuate Sid does not**** invent time travel?
The final Loop is a “what if moment” on if Bruce Willis goes back and actually kills Sid, and prevents time travel. If that happens then Jeff Danial’s is also never there to make JGL a Looper in the first place. He lives that depressing life that Jeff Danials “saved him from”. Then also Bruce Willis saves the Asian girl, by either never meeting her OR she still “cleans him up” but there is no Rainmaker to kill her.
But that’s not what we were told. He saw his mother shot. Like I said, not a plot hole (it’s the second-hand telling of a rumor) but bad story-telling in that it leads everyone to believe Willis killed the mom that led to the Rainkiller which led to Willis to hunt the young Rainmaker ehich leads to him shooting the mom which leads …
When explaining time travel Old Joe described seeing the altered past as a fog of probabilities or some such. I take the rumors to be manifestations of the most likely outcome up until Young Joe kills himself.
Throwing all talk of time travel aside, can I say I loved the second time they showed Old Joe coming back and escaping? The first time it was standard action fare, quick paced and up close. Then when they show it again, they reveal that the whole thing was really awkward, with Old Joe turning falling over, and then punching young Joe.
he loop:
Young version of Joe 1 (Old Joe, Bruce Willis) Kills a Masked Joe in his timeline.
Joe 1 retires and gets wife. Wife is killed by Rain maker. Joe 1 goes back without mask to change past in order to save wife.
Joe 2 (Young Joe, Joseph Gordan Levitt) doesn’t kill unmasked Joe 1. Joe 2 watches Joe 1 kill Sarah, Cid becomes Rain maker. Joe 1 is either killed by Cid that very moment or wanders earth until dies and Joe 2 is far enough to avoid death (in car). Cid invents time travel in order to kill the looper before he shoots his mother, Sarah. Cid finds older version of Joe 2 in 2072-74 and is sent back with a mask, and Joe 2 does not need to prevent anyone’s death as he does not have the same wife Joe 1 had.
Joe 1 is Unmasked Joe that Joe 2 doesn’t kill in his timeline. And Joe 2 is Masked Joe that Joe 1 kills in his timeline.
The Explanation:
The Rain maker exists in Joe 1’s timeline, indicating that regardless of whether he saw his mother shot or grew up without any of these events occurring, Cid becomes the Rain Maker and invents time travel.
But in the film Young Joe decides to kill himself, closing the loop.
Loophole: How can young Joe’s decision to kill himself and save Cid not have influenced the very same events that cause him to have to make that decision in the first place?
The term Loophole is ironically supportive/ part of the story because it means there is a way to escape the story, which is exactly what Young Joe did……
That’s what I took from it anyway. The only thing I need to find out now is whether Joe 2 had the scar on his ear when he was killed by Joe 1 at the beginning. This would confirm or collapse my perspective.
I have drawn a diagram to explain this further if anyone would like to see it.
So why didn’t she just say she had a 5 year old in the house then? Either age could potentially make noise, a 5 year old even more so. Why not tell the truth?
Except she’d already told him that her son wasn’t in the house. Also, her son is, like, five - why didn’t she say, “I have a five year old son?” instead of “I have a ten year old son?”
I just saw this. I loved it, and I don’t think it had any potholes at all. I think the movie takes place in the Xth iteration of the timeline in a universe that obeys Niven’s law. The “original” timeline we see couldn’t have arisen spontaneously; it relied on previous loops in which information from the future is brought to the past, changing the future. In the previous loop, the Rainmaker arose for slightly different reasons, but I took that as granted by the premise. (I also didn’t see the Rainmaker as having a special grudge against loopers, though maybe he did. I thought closing the loops was just part of wiping out the old regime.) The iteration we see obviously isn’t stable either; that thirty years will turn out differently without Joe and possibly with a good Cid. In the end, the only stable timeline is one in which time travel is never invented.
PS–The thing with claiming a ten-year-old son was to avoid confirming for the guy that he was in the right house with a child born on the particular date.
That’s a good point, especially considering how little Sara really knows about the situation with old Joe, and what sort of resources he can bring to bear on killing her son. In those circumstances, “Lie about everything,” is probably the safest tactic.
I saw it last night and was able to successfully suspend my disbelief for the entire movie and quite enjoyed it. The only thing bugging me, and I might have misunderstood the exposition, is that the idea of ‘closing the loop’ existed with or without the Rainmaker. If every looper knew that, in about thirty years, their loop would be closed, why didn’t Willis’ character make an attempt to go into hiding before the end of his thirty years?