Looper and the time travel conundrum

(Illustration courtesy of boy Roland)

The other day, I watched a nifty sci-fi thriller by the name of Looper, starring Joseph Gordon Levitt as "Joe" and Bruce Willis as Joe from 30 years in the future. The plot of the film is kinda hard to explain because it involves time travel, but I'll attempt it anyway. Basically, in the future the mob possesses time travel, and they dispose of people by sending them to the past, where they are then killed by hired thugs, or "Loopers." And they're called Loopers because at some point the mob sends them their future self to kill, as a way of making sure they don't ever blab about what they've been up to. The act of killing one's future self is called "closing your loop," hence Loopers.

The film was a welcome change of pace from the normal Hollywood fare. For one thing, pretty much the entire movie takes place in rural America, which is nice because I'm seriously tired of every movie having to take place in New York, Chicago or Los Angeles. (Seriously: when was the last time you saw a horrific Godzilla-type monster not attacking New York, L.A. or Chicago in a movie? To Hollywood, those may as well be the only three cities in the country.) I liked that the climactic scenes were on a farm, and I liked that the main character was a bit of a scumbag. Mostly though, I enjoyed how fresh and creative the concept of Looper was; it's not a perfect movie by any means, but it's more than worth a Redbox rental if you're into seeing Bruce Willis kill people like he's the Terminator.

If there's anything that bothered me about the movie, it's that so much of it is based around the wonky dynamics of time travel, and inevitably, the story reaches the point that it does in all time travel stories, where you stop and go, "Wait, if I were them and I could travel back in time, I'd have done things a hell of a lot differently."

There are two things about time travel that I'm not a fan of. The first is that it completely takes away any finality that would otherwise be in a story; if something terrible happens, like if someone dies, you know that someone else can always go back and prevent that terrible thing from ever happening. Time travel not only obliterates continuity, it more or less gives select characters the power of a god; they now possess the ability to rewrite history if they so please. In fact, the scope of time travel is so massive that in order to make it so that the characters can't do something truly drastic -- like murdering Hitler or saving the Dodo bird from extinction -- the writers will install limitations to time traveling so that the characters aren't able to completely redefine the planet.

A typical limitation is that the time machine can only go back so far, like to when it was first built. But these limitations are often impossible to take seriously. After all, if I'm to accept that mankind has mastered the space-time continuum and can now bend reality to its will, how come we can't send people back far enough in time to where it's really really easy to kill someone? Like, you'd think going back and killing Hitler wouldn't be that hard; you just have to go far enough back to where he's like a kid kicking a soccer ball, shoot him in the head, and BLAMMO! Just like that, World War II has been averted. Instead, movies are constructed in such a way that the whole convenience of going back in time is nullified. If you wanted to make a movie about a guy going back to kill Hitler, some limitation would be put on the time machine so that the earliest you could go back would be 1942 Nazi Germany, when Hitler was in full power and was protected by a battalion of super-soldiers.

(Illustration courtesy of Salman Anjum)

Granted, this contrivance is put in place to make movies more exciting; shooting 10-year-old Hitler kicking a soccer ball isn't nearly as exciting nor as gratifying as shooting Hitler at the height of his power. Still: making the movie more exciting isn't a valid excuse for characters not planning things ahead or doing things that are head-slappingly logical, and that's one of the problems I had with Looper. Bruce Willis goes back in time and spends the entire movie trying to fend off his previous self (Gordon Levitt) on his quest to kill someone, but the whole exercise could have been averted had Willis just waited like 30 minutes before going to back in time. (Keep in mind that time travel works in real time in this movie.) By then, his previous self probably would have abandoned the spot where Willis would have appeared, and where he was supposed to kill him; Willis then could have slipped quietly into town and begun his hunt for revenge without having to endanger his previous self.

But that's small potatoes compared to the biggest problem with Looper, which happens to be the principle flaw with all time travel stories: there's a raging inconsistency between what is and isn't affected by time travel. In Looper, Bruce Willis (or Joe from the future) had killed his own future self back when he was the age of Joseph Gordon Levit, but when he goes back in time, essentially as the same man he killed when he was younger, he turns the tables and escapes the clutches of his prior self. Now at that point, Gordon Levitt's Joe is a completely different person from the Joe that Bruce Willis was -- if that makes any sense. In layman's terms, Joe's future has been completely ruptured. There's no chance -- NONE -- that this interaction with the future version of himself wouldn't have dramatically altered the rest of his life.

And yet the movie wants to pretend that this isn't the case. At one point the two Joe's meet in a diner, and Bruce Willis is talking about his wife and his future and crap, which have somehow been unaltered from going back in time... and it's impossible, impossible, impossible. I could have bought the scene if Willis had gone back to a parallel universe, meaning that what happened to the younger version of himself there wouldn't affect him. HOWEVER, in the movie, it's established that what happens to young Joe happens to old Joe. Joe's history, essentially, can be rewritten by his previous self. So then how the hell does he still have his memories from his old life? Seriously: how? Because of what older Joe has done, the present Joe is on the run from the mob and is living an entirely different life; I can't buy that these two men are still destined to have the same future, not when the gargantuan, life-altering wrinkle of meeting/trying to kill his future self has been introduced.

Yes, yes, I know the rebuttal you're forging in your head, dear strawman. You're thinking: "Oh come on Reetae, it's just a movie. You're supposed to suspend your disbelief." But I say nay! I shouldn't need to reduce my intelligence to enjoy something, and the problem with Looper was that what the film was asking me to believe -- that the only thing that affects Bruce Willis' Joe is violence that's inflicted on his past self -- is preposterous, and is contrary to the rest of the plot, which revolves around him trying to kill one person which in turn will supposedly rewrite all of history. (The movie tries its best to repel these logical inconsistencies, with Willis just shaking his head and saying that it would take too long to explain all the time travel mumbo jumbo.)

The best thing I can say about Looper is that it's still a very cool movie in spite of the blatant continuity problems that persist from the moment future Joe appears on screen. As a writer (if I can use that term loosely), I have tremendous respect and empathy for whoever wrote this script; I too have written things that I thought were good, only to realize in retrospect that it had massive plot holes, holes so gaping that untangling them would have meant ripping apart the entire story. At that point the choice is either to scrap the project or to finish it anyway, hoping that people will be able to look past its giant flaws. Looper is a cool movie; it's cool enough that it deserves to exist -- and deserved to be written -- even with all its plot holes, and there are very, very few sci-fi movies that I could bestow such a compliment upon.