The Sword and Laser discussion

Anyone else see Looper yet? I thought it was pretty good..but I was a little unsatified with the ending. If it were up to me I would have

(view spoiler)[had young Joe's body disappear after old Joe did, and reset things back to him in a field about to kill someone again. If you want the "happy" ending, you make that someone not be his future self.

The way I figure it..if he killed himself, then his older self never came back..which was the cause of the kid going on to close the loop on everyone. So if the kid didn't do that..maybe old Joe and his wife lived happily ever after?

It's tough to say because if he never killed himself and got his gold pay day, would have have ever gone on to meet his wife in the first place?

Maybe that's why they left it like they did. With changing time lines that aren't alternate worlds..not sure how you handle things gracefully (hide spoiler)]

I saw it and I liked it, but I have a HUGE problem with the 'I can change the timeline I'm a part Of" trope. Because ti leads to exactly these kinds of issues you raise Rob.

The point in time you're viewing in the movie is not privileged. Assume all points in time exist simultaneously. Suddenly nothing makes sense. How can an action in 2044 change something int he future. Once you posit time travel, all point sin time are equal, so one can't suddenly change another or have ramifications on the past.

If Joe went back in time, then he always went back in time. Why is 2044 some special part fo time that can be changed?

I'm Ok with alternate realities being created etc... but that means multiple versions of Joe too, so killing himself wouldn't make his older self disappear, it would just split off the timeline.

Anyway, all that said, I actually liked the movie a lot.

GAhhh... DAMMIT use spoiler tags Tom.

@Rick

In my opinion nothing Tom wrote is a spoiler, he's simply talking about different theories on time travel in the context of the movie. The idea that Joe is supposed to kill himself is in the trailer..

@Tom

My friend I went to see it with brought up many of the same points. He thought a movie that handles this much better was the Spanish film: Timecrimes. I watched it on his suggestion a few years ago, but honestly don't remember it too well (which tells me I didn't like it as much as he did, though I gave it a 3).

It's on Netflix streaming however, if anyone is interested.

I saw it and was not impressed.

(view spoiler)[My husband called it "The Omen with Time Travel."  But really, time travel was almost not even a thing.  I thought the guy everyone made fun of was going to end up being the child in the field, and that somehow there would have been a bigger conspiracy of relocating people back and forth in time.  Instead, he just ends up being a fool.  I also thought that the kid might be Joe at a much younger age, after all HE WAS ADOPTED and given away and all that.  See?  It could have been better, more nuanced.  More... loopy.

The complaint I hear the most is that young guy didn't look like Bruce Willis, but I thought that was the one thing they pulled off pretty well.  I also loved the tiny detail of the self-powered fertilizer bot.  I wanted more time travel.  And if they went to the trouble of adding the stripper character who has the son, don't you think they could have made that story more interesting too instead of using it as an excuse to show boobs?  What if the entire reason she latched on to him was so that he'd have to kill the child he was actually connected to, as in a very intentional painful punishment? 

I kept expecting Bruce (old Joe) to have more of a story, but instead of him having an interesting life post-looper, it was all how he fell in LOVE and settled DOWN and was really HAPPY and while that is really nice, I wanted him to be being punished for something.  Love stories are more interesting paired with danger.  And it was like... young danger with old love.  (hide spoiler)]

Maybe time is bistable - you always have to go through the loop twice to get both possibilities...

I thought it was an enjoyable film overall, but then I'd happily watch Emily Blunt knitting for two hours!

Jenny wrote: "I saw it and was not impressed."

My thoughts:

(view spoiler)[Joe wasn't adopted, Jenny. He was abandoned by his mother (because she couldn't feed them both) and lived on the streets until Abe (the mob guy from the future who's in charge of the Loopers) found him, gave him a gun, and made Joe the youngest Looper in the business. Joe and Cid (the young kid who grew up to be the Rainmaker in Old Joe's timeline) couldn't be the same person because Cid has TK abilities and Joe does not. Also, if they were the same person, then that means Joe had sex with his mom. Now, while there's a long history of time-traveling characters in SF literature (Lazarus Long, Severian) who do just that, that just wouldn't fly in a mainstream movie. Nobody has Cid's level of TK ability ever, so nobody else in the movie could be Cid either. Now, there are some hints that Kid Blue and Abe might be the same person, but it's not definitive. I suspect that's because the story isn't about them, so it simply isn't necessary to elaborate on that and it perhaps would have detracted from the story the director wanted to tell. What the story is about is the importance of parenting and how violence begets violence in a vicious loop. Young Joe sees himself, metaphorically, in Cid because he grew up without parents, same as Cid/Rainmaker in Old Joe's timeline. Young Joe sacrifices himself in a selfless act to break the loop of violence so that Cid can grow up in safe and loving environment with a mother who loves him.

I'm not saying the movie is without problems. I'm not sure the TK stuff works or really fits with the story. Kid Blue's story arc was underdeveloped. I don't think the futures depicted were well realized or believable, and the special effects and futuretech and set design were at best serviceable given the relatively small budget the director had to work with, but I do think it was well written and poignant.

I think Rian Johnson's previous movie, The Brothers Bloom was far better, near perfect actually. Too bad almost nobody saw it. I recommend seeking it out. (hide spoiler)]

Ed wrote: "I think Rian Johnson's previous movie, The Brothers Bloom was far better, near perfect actually. Too bad almost nobody saw it. I recommend seeking it out."

You didn't need to put this part in your spoiler section. :-D

I think my friend that I saw looper with also recommended this. I added it to my NF queue.

Ed wrote: "Jenny wrote: "I saw it and was not impressed."

My ..."

Just to clarify, Ed- I'm not sure I was seeing these things in the film, and would agree with all your corrections to my viewpoint. I think these are more accurately directions I felt it could have gone and been more interesting to me as a viewer. I was restless halfway through.

I really enjoyed this movie. More than the plot, I really liked the look and feel of the universe provided.

(view spoiler)[ 1. I loved a bit in the beginning when Joe is primpimg his hair and hesitates on his receeding hair line for just a second before moving on. Knowing that he is destined to have Bruce Willis's hair made that a very nice touch.
2. There is a throaway line from Emily Blunt (sorry, don't remember her character name) about Joe not burning down her sugar cane. This is Kansas...sugar cane? I guess global warming has made some 'progress' in the next 32 years.
3. I loved all of the "old" (90s, 00s) cars with aftermarket mods related to energy. Emily Blunts truck had some tubing coming off of the muffler that flowed into the gas pipe. Some other cars had solar panels soldered onto their hoods. It was really indicative of a declining economy - neat stuff. (hide spoiler)]

As for theories about time travel, whenever find my noodle twisted into a knot, I always fall back on an old L. Sprague de Camp short story called "Aristotle and the Gun." He posits one's own personal timeline as a thread, and talks about the positive or negative curvature of time...

Any instance of time travel into the past creates a divergent thread - it frays into two pieces. the question is, what direction will that frayed new piece go?

is there some sort of ordained path, with events slowly 'normalizing' and the thread eventually curving back towards the original thread, with only a tiny bump of change? He calls that positive curvature of time. (the example he uses to explain this is if he went back and killed Benjamin Franklin, someone else would 'discover' electricity and do all the things Franklin did, so the only real change two hundred years later would bea a bunch of roads and colleged with a different name - maybe Dickinson instead of Franklin).

Or, would that fray divert off into some completely different direction, with tons of unanticipated events? he called that negative curvature.

I'm not going to ruin the story to tell you how he discovers what way time curves, and the implication of it - the story is too good, you should check it out.

the point though.. is that when a movie like Looper does not deign to explain how it's version of time travel works, I find myself applying L. Sprague de Camp's theories to the story. It works!

I loved this movie. I want to see it again. the only think i didn't like was the prosthetics

Ye I made a thread about it but didn't realize there was already another. I loved it made me cry, but I guess I didn't think too deeply about the science behind it. I loved the ending, really touching, like I said in another post, it felt like a well told story loved the pacing and you got to know the characters, which I miss in a lot of films, usually the people don't mean enough to me, anyway thought it was excellent and thanks to Rob for directing me in the right direction.

Darren wrote: "Source Code? The Time Traveller's Wife? ... Outlander? Timecop? Twelve Monkeys was better, though."

So was Primer. If you haven't seen that, you should!

i'll second a vote for primer... best time traveling ,movie i have ever seen. for me it was even better the second and third time thru (think memento).

another great (unknown)time traveler movie is "11 minutes ago". both of these movies were independents and done on the cheap. i think i read that primer was shot for less than $10k. Because neither movie had the budgets for exploding helicopters, they were forced to write tight and very smart screenplays (often the worst part of bigger budget time-benders).

i happened to like looper. entertaining and (somewhat) thought provoking.

I liked Looper. Like Fight Club or Inglourious Basterds, it was not the movie promised by the trailers, but was all the better for that.

Yeah, the time travel stuff doesn't really work, but it's rare to find a time travel movie that isn't a comedy that actually gets it right. (I've been meaning to see Primer but haven't got around to it yet.)

For me, the dangling thread was (view spoiler)[I wasn't quite convinced the Rainmaker was all that bad. All the people who told us the Rainmaker was bad news were contract killers who'd spent years killing helpless targets, the same guys he was in the process of getting rid of. Otherwise, there was only that Chinese news report in 2074 that mentioned the Rainmaker, but I didn't understand it (if anyone can translate, I'd appreciate it). For all I know, the Rainmaker was taking over all organized crime and closing all loops to put the mob out of business. (hide spoiler)]

Ed wrote: "Jenny wrote: "I saw it and was not impressed."

My thoughts:

Joe wasn't adopted, Jenny. He was abandoned by his mother (because she couldn't feed them both) and lived on the streets until Abe (the..."

I agree with what you said except the last part: that 'The Brothers Bloom' was better than 'Looper' :S Bloom was a nice twist of the con-man movie genre, but there's absolutely no way it's better than Mamet's movies or 'The Sting', for that matter; and therefore not a perfect movie.

You know which movie is better than 'Looper', though? Rian Johnson's opera prima 'Brick'... I have a really soft spot for that movie and like it more than 'Looper' :)

Hey guys! I don't know if you've heard, but the director Rian Johnson recorded and released a theatrical commentary of the movie that you can listen to while watching 'Looper' in the movie theatre.

It's actually a really good and he does go into details about the plot and structure of the film.

You can download it from Rian's SoundCloud page: http://soundcloud.com/rcjohnso/looper...

Carlos wrote: "... director Rian Johnson recorded and released a theatrical commentary of the movie ..."

This is such a brilliant idea. Why wait for DVD for the commentary track? Also encourages the audience to see the movie multiple times in the theatre.

I wouldn't go so far as to call it brilliant. But then, I rarely if ever, listen to the commentary on DVDs. I hate when people talk through a movie. I don't really want to voluntarily add that.

I guess if you like a movie enough to see it a second time in theaters (if you're doing this on the first watching, why bother seeing the movie at all?), and like commentary, it's a good idea.

I'll be curious to see if this catches on though.

Brilliant is just slang for "cool". I picked it up from too many british friends.

I have listened to a few commentaries before and they are really interesting, the ones I watched were a bit like behind the scenes info and some were like flies on the wall commentary were the actors were just chatting among themselves about the film, it was good.