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Saturday 27 October 2012

Loopers


Time travel, how I hate thee. 


Seriously, I'm not a huge fan of time-travel plots. Mostly because they generally don't make sense in the end, but that can be forgiven with enough bang bang or dakka dakka.

That said, there's not enough of that in Looper to make me think it's an action film, which makes me think a lot more about the plot of the movie. Which in this case...is slightly detrimental to my impression of the film.

First of all, Looper is set in 2044 and centres around a guy who's basically an assassin who kills people who are sent back in time from 30 years in the future. See, time travel is around in 2074 but not 2044, but in 2074, it's harder to dispose of a body because as the movie puts it, the bodies are 'tagged' or something, which probably means microchip inserts or whatnot. Time travel is also outlawed in the future, which means only huuuuge criminal syndicates use it. 

This is one of the things I have issues with in the film. Why send people back in time just to kill them? According to science, theoretical time travel should take a few hundred nuclear stations running for years to be able to send 1 person back in time. And these criminal syndicates just send loads of people back all the time. Seriously, kill them in the future. Just because you can't dispose of the body doesn't mean there aren't other ways to kill someone. Make it look like an accident -_- Don't dispose of the body. Get a fall guy. Shit, even Sherlock Holmes once said 'the simpler the crime, the harder it is to solve'. It would be a lot cheaper -_-

Right, so that's major plot hole number 1. 

Now the loopers have this special clause that once they're retired, in 30 years from their retirement, they will be sent back in time for their younger self to kill. This is called 'closing the loop'. Now as you can imagine, killing your future self isn't something most people would like to do and there are people who hesitate and refuse to do it. What happens to the first person on screen who lets his future self go is brutal and somewhat disturbing. But it fits in very well with the first half of the movie. However, as my friend put it 'WTF decided that the younger self should be the one to kill the older self?' Why not just have them switch dance parners? Have person A kill future self B and have person B kill future self A. Seems like it'd be a lot less messy. And sounds like the system was designed by either a retard or someone who liked irony too much. 

So the main char has his future self (Bruce willis) appear and fails to kill him due to the future self being a better bad ass than him. At this point, he's on the run from the mob and trying to find his future self and kill him so he can have his life back. It's ironic and both characters are kinda dickish. We also get a glimpse of what his 30 years of retirement are like.

At which point I have to ask, is there something in Bruce Willis contract that states he must ALWAYS ALWAYS be portrayed as a bad ass in whatever movie he's in and that he must always hook up with a MUCH younger chick? Seriously, this is like RED all over again. 

Anyway, Bruce Willis has come back to kill the Rainmaker; the leader of the criminal syndicate in the future. Except the Rainmaker is still a kid at this point of time. He believes by doing so, he can resolve all the shitty things that happened during his life. So cue this giant chase in which Levitt chases Willis while the gang chases both of them. 

And then somehow Bruce Willis ends up killing the entire crime syndicate in the past -_- By himself. In a huge showdown. Seriously, look at 2 paragraphs above -_- WTF is with this writing? 

So anyhow, at the end Bruce Willis is about to try and kill the rainmaker and will accidentally end up shooting his mother. Levitt; his younger self, then has this premonition that this is what creates the rainmaker. Because when his older self kills the mother, the child will still escape and then grow up to be an angry and confused TK freak who then becomes the rainmaker. And this is the loop they're talking about in the movie, so he decides to end the loop and kills himself; thus erasing his older self and saving the mother so the kid can grow up to NOT be the rainmaker.

Except this really really doesn't make sense. Because in the older self's memories, we see that the older self DID succeed in killing his looped self before which meant that he couldn't have killed the rainmaker in the original timeline which meant the child STILL grew up to be a psychotic bastard even when his mother was around because the older self was never around to kill her in the first place. 

So yeah...time travel? Hate it -_-

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