Yes, in 2012 and with 2012’s level of technology, perhaps you would want to go into hiding. What’s great about this movie is that technology actually does progress in the future and this affects how the characters behave. Contrast this with, say Prometheus, where the characters don’t seem to know how to use their tech properly.
In the movie it was mentioned that in the future everyone is tagged, which makes murder problematic. Presumably, this makes it easy to find someone and therefore pointless for Joe to go into hiding.
It also explains why victims are sent to the past alive. With “2012 thinking”, you might wonder why the bad guys don’t kill their victims first, then send their bodies into the past for disposal. Again, the answer lies with future tech. If you are tagged, your murderer can be found. If the bad guys kill their victims first, they get nabbed by police. If they send the victim alive into the past, they get away scot-free.
Okay, so what about the tragic killing of Old Joe’s wife? Well, it was an *accidental *killing. Which means one of the bad guys is now wanted by police. Which makes him a liability. How do the bad guys deal with liabilities in the future? They send them back to a looper for disposal. So now the police have a murder they cannot solve and the remaining bad guys are safe from prosecution.
So now you might wonder, how is it that if a victim is tagged can the police find the murderer? Again, the answer lies with future tech. The movie does not spell out the details (and it shouldn’t have to because the tech does not exist yet), but the assumption is something will exist that can record the details of the murder in a way that instantly and unambiguously implicates the murderer. It could be like nanotech injected into people that have cameras and other recording devices and an internet link to upload the info to the police. It doesn’t activate until someone dies, for privacy reasons.
Yes, but Joe is/was a criminal operator. He also knows the exact date/time when the Mafia is coming for him. Yet he was caught completely flat-footed. The fact that he was so unprepared and genuinely surprised for their coming took me out of the movie for a few seconds. If he was simply resigned to the fact that he was going to be ‘closed’, why didn’t he make sure his wife was away? Knowing the exact time and date of your own death is not something you forget or are apt to take lightly but Joe seemed completely clueless there.
All Joe knows is “30 years”, you are making your own assumption about the exactness of the time interval. Does Joe even know (to the minute) what the time interval is for sending someone into the past? Even if he did, it still takes time to nab someone and take them to the time machine. How does Joe know how much dilly-dallying the bad guys will take in transporting someone?
And Joe thought his wife had left. She had gone out and it was by coincidence that she came back for something right as he was getting nabbed.
The fact is, once Abe dies the present effect should have been that Joe should be out of the looper plot altogether. If Abe didn’t live to the future, he wouldn’t have gone to the past to get Joe involved.
If that doesn’t affect the plot, then nothing should really. Then Old Joe shouldn’t dissappear when Young Joe kills himself.
Joe, like all Loopers, was resigned to fate. For all he knew, if he didn’t go back to get killed, then Yuon Joe might not meet his wife. It’s only when his wife was killed that he decided to change it.
That doesn’t make any sense. Abe was already from the future. He doesn’t get old and then come back again. That would be an infinite loop and Abe would be hundreds of years old. Unless young Abe got killed, which I don’t ever remember happening.
Another point to remember is that changes happen in real time, they don’t ripple backwards. When young Joe killed himself, it didn’t undo the whole plot, it just made Old joe disappear then and there.
It’s odd that both this film and Dredd feature psychic powers (which AFAIK are never mentioned in the ads or trailers) which seem to have appeared for no reason at all and are both set in Crapsack Worlds. Aren’t there any optimistic film futures anymore?
I don’t like psi in fiction; it’s a lazy way of creating conflict and/or solving problems and turns something that might have been SF into X-Files woo shit.
Old Joe is killed by young Joe. Sid grows up to be Rainmaker
Old Joe isn’t killed by young Joe. Old Joe kill’s Sid’s mom. Sid grows up to be Rainmaker.
Old Joe isn’t killed by young Joe, because young Joe kills himself, but Sid and/pr Sid’s mom is sufficiently inspired by young Joe’s sacrifice that Sid doesn’t grow up to be the Rainmaker.
I agree that there are three in the movie, but the infographic does show Cid becoming the Rainmaker before Old Joe travels back to 2044, which doesn’t make sense.
It still looks good and is informative, though, so I guess it’s a good infographic.
Just saw the movie, thought it was okay, a little slow moving through the first hour or so, then it picked up. Anyways, my biggest issues with the movie are;
How did Sara know about Loopers? Young Joe began explaining time travel to her as if it’s something completely unheard of in their time, yet she seems to know all about it even though it doesn’t exist yet.
At the very end of the movie, Young Joe realizes that Sid becomes evil because of all the evil he has seen. The death of his adoptive mother (Sara’s sister) and then his mother, herself. Young Joe has the vision of Sid on the train taking care of himself with a mean look on his face.
Earlier in the movie Old Joe explains that every experience Young Joe has is immediately turned into a memory for Old Joe (which is proved multiple times in the movie). So why, when Young Joe Realize that Sid would turn out fine if Sara lived, doesn’t Old Joe realize it as well and put the gun down?
Loopers certainly exist in her time, but very much as a “subculture” mafia thing. So he can be forgiven for thinking she doesn’t know about them.
The movie is rife with this sort of problem.
Take for example old Joe’s motive, to get back to his wife. In the timeline where young Joe is doing all that stuff with Sara, it seems unlikely that he will go to China and meet her in the first place - it is Sara and not his futire wife who “redeems” him & breaks him from his addiction, for example. So why doesn’t old Joe’s motive dissapear?
The issue is whether this is a bug (a plothole) or a feature (a plot point). My take was that part of the point of the movie was to get the audience to puzzle over these paradoxes.
I read an interview with Rian Johnson (that I can’t find this second) where he discussed that. In the scene where Old Joe is in the sewer or whatever he is actively fighting to retain his memories of his wife. I’m up in the air as to whether that’s a cop out, but at least he didn’t pretend like the problem wasn’t there.
I think the reason Young Joe’s realization wasn’t enough to stop Old Joe is because OJ’s motives were entirely different than YJ’s. Even though they’re the same person those thirty years have changed OJ from the person who, when confronted with YJ’s realization, would sacrifice himself to one who only cares about his selfish goals.
I noticed at least one non-paradox-related plot hole:
Supposedly they are sending victims back in time because you can’t cleanly dispose of bodies in the future. And yet, the Rainmaker’s thugs blithely kill Bruce Willis’s wife. What about her body?
My friend asked why the didn’t just transport the soon to be dead people to the bottom of the ocean or something. Seems like future people aren’t that smart after all.