Sounds like a bizarre mixture of two different time travel theories, usually there is:
1.Self consistent timeline, everything plays out as it always has and always will.
2.Fluid changeable timeline.
This film seems to be a bizarre mix of the two, the timeline is self consistent but changeable! Old Joe will have the memories of Young Joe, but not before Young Joe does what leaves the memory! Changes instantly propagate though the future and past.
This sounds very confusing.
Exactly. The more actions Young Joe does to alter the timeline Old Joe Remembers, it’s makes his memories cloudier and becomes a memory consisting of voids and probabilities. I like that—it has a certain wave/particle quantum entanglement duality to it. Until it all collapses depending on what Young Joe actually does.
The movie’s idea of time travel seems to be that the future is mutable, but the present isn’t.
[spoiler]So when Joe shoots himself and erases Old Joe from reality, all the carnage Old Joe caused still happened.
In a freaky way, this could even allow for Abe/Kid Blue to die twice, if indeed they’re the same person. Old Joe kills Abe, but leaves Kid Blue alive. Kid Blue then dies in his confrontation with Joe. Had Kid Blue died first (assuming he and Abe were the same person), Abe would’ve vanished like Old Joe. But since Abe died first, his younger self Kid Blue is still around to get killed shortly thereafter by Joe. Why doesn’t this erase Abe from the timeline? For the same reason Old Joe vanishing doesn’t bring Abe and the other Gatmen and that kid he killed back from the dead – time wants to keep everything that’s happened in the ‘present’, so to speak, part of canon. Sort of like a knot that keeps the fabric of time from unraveling.[/spoiler]
By the way, I thought the movie was great.
Yeah, I really liked the idea that the universe just doesn’t give a shit about paradoxes. Like the whole idea of cause and effect is really just a limitation on human perception.
I don’t think Abe and Kid Blue are the same person.
He wouldn’t have broken his hand with a ball peen hammer, rendering his own hand maimed for life. He couldn’t stand the schmuck.
BTW, Daniels had some hilarious lines in this movie. Especially about how affected everyone’s fashion is with their neck ties, and reusing fashion from decades ago… “Do something different… like wear some glowing shit around your neck, or someshit… I dunno… just be original, ferchristsake.”
Three 8s equals 32. Three timelines (loops). I hope that’s clear 
Sorry if I’m being whooshed here, but does your post have some NON-mathematical meaning I’m not getting? Because three eights is 24, not 32.
forgotten how to spoiler. Back soon.
It was a reference from the movie. A rather amusing one, before all hell breaks loose.
I’m stumped.
The thing that niggled at me the most while watching the film was that Young Joe has attached earlobes and Old Joe has detached earlobes. For some reason, that bothered me. 
Yeh, I’m not sure of his interpretation, either. Here’s what I thought about that scene:
[spoiler]the kid was doing multiplication tables with his mom. He was nailing every multiplication, until he stubbornly insisted that 8x3 = 32. I think he was just trying to spitefully piss off who he believed wasn’t his real mother. Nothing more.
Maybe Isamu was thinking of the figure eight symbol representing a closed, infinite loop, and 3 of those represents 3 timelines. The original, the one where Joe lives out his 30 years and stops his loop from closing. Then the last timeline when Joe shoots himself and Sid goes on accepting and loving his mother, ostensibly living out a brighter timeline.
What that has to do with the number 32, I have no idea.[/spoiler]
Just saw it. LOOOOOOOOOVED it.
The rainmaker is:
[spoiler]Good. He asks his mom if the man is bad. She says we don’t know that yet. Later CID Rainmaker knows he is good and then cleans up the mob in the near future.
Seems like the mafia lies to all the loopers and the Rainmaker is their enemy, not by calling them out, but just by eliminating them. Possibly due to the fact that Young Joe sacrificed himself. Not sure. Thoughts on that??[/spoiler]
Great screenplay. As good as Usual Suspects.
Saw it tonight. I agree with the consensus that it’s a good movie but full of unresolved plot holes.
One I don’t think anyone’s mentioned is about Suzie. Of all of the millions of kids living in the city, what are the odds that Joe would know the mother of one of the three kids he was looking for? That’s a coincidence of Dickensian proportions.
But it did show that Kid Blue remained a screw-up. When he wanted to redeem himself, his plan was to stake out Suzie’s place because he knew Joe liked her. But that plan didn’t work. The only reason Joe went there was because he was following the kid. Joe didn’t know Suzie lived there and Blue didn’t know Joe was looking for the kids. It was just the random amazing coincidence I mentioned above that Joe showed up where Blue was waiting for him.
Everyone seems to assume Cid has changed his ways and now won’t grow up to be the Rainmaker. I don’t see why. He still has all his telekinetic power. And we’ve seen he grew up to be the Rainmaker once when Joe never appeared and a second time when Joe appeared and killed Sara. So apparently his destiny is pretty robust.
Forgot to comment on this before.
I figured this was just a self-referential joke. Joseph Gordon-Levitt did the movie wearing a chin prosthesis to make him look more like Bruce Willis. Being as Gordon-Levitt is a pretty well-known actor it was sort of obvious, so I thought they were just winking at the audience with a line about somebody having a “synthetic jaw”.
As long as this thread has been revived, Looper has been getting some award traction in the Oscar race for its original screenplay (in part because most of the season’s heavy-hitters are in the other category). If it makes the cut, it would be Rian Johnson’s first nomination.
It’s always nice when sci-fi films get some attention in other than the craft/technical categories (the film didn’t make the VFX final list, but may still score in the Sound categories) so it’ll be fun to see if things pan out.
Posting into this thread very late, since we just saw the flick last night on Vudu, but… it strikes me as possible that the makers deliberately chose a woman with a small bust to go with the other social differences in 2044. Of COURSE he would have been hanging with a well-endowed woman in our time or any time in the past 40 years, but that time is different. Made sense to me.
The two scenes of Old Joe’s execution did not, which is why I looked up this thread. I’m just barely convinced on the two-timelines idea; I think there is some big sloppiness in the final edit of the film (things cut, not shot, not clearly scripted, etc.)
Did anyone else think JGL’s appearance changed so much between scenes that there seemed to be 2 or 3 different characters? In at least one scene, we had to hit pause, then back up because we couldn’t agree whether the character was Young Joe or not.
I’ve read another one which I missed when I watched the movie: Willis is left-handed and Gordon-Levitt is right-handed.
In the deleted scenes Old Joe does indeed get out the straws and attempt to explain how things work to Young Joe, but it really doesn’t clear much up (Joe’s no scientist). Only thing really lost when they cut the scene was confirmation that there indeed is a fixed 30 year interval for time travel that can’t be adjusted (no explanation why, timey wimey wibbly wobbly indeed).
Also, in another cut scene Abe has a guy try to execute Kid Blue, which pretty much rules out them being temporal counterparts (the director and Kid Blue’s actor say as much in the commentary for the scene).
I had a problem with the whole “how’d Cid become the Reignmaker (he’s making a reign, not the rain! :p) in the first loop if Bruce Willis was dead?” thing but various suggestions from the thread have made it less of an issue for me. First timeline, barely tolerated Sara, 2nd timeline after Young Joe came along he calls her Mom, etc.
I still wonder how Sara knew what a looper was, though. Just her having a bad lifestyle to raise a kid possibly making her hang out the mob, well, that’s too much extrapolation for me. Young Joe really should’ve asked her how she knew.
I’m pretty sure in one scene he was Brad Pitt.
Hey, you start messing with time travel you get weird crossover effects.