I Love Time Travel - Part 10 - Looper

Not the spitting image of David Addison

Looper started off so very good. A gritty crime drama that morphs into a couple of love stories. The cool action, detailed backdrops and a fun sci-fi script work quite well, but the holes in our observance of time travel were a little too much for me to accept.

Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) lives in 2044.  Sometime in the 2070’s time travel is invented and immediately outlawed.  A crime syndicate has the technology, and uses it to dispose of people by sending them back to 2044 to be executed.  The hitmen from the past are loopers and they are paid well for their services.  Eventually their individual ‘loops’ are closed by the future syndicate sending back the aging loopers themselves to be executed by the 2044 version.  The young versions are retired with a stack of money and have 30 years to live out their lives until they are sent back.

I love the concept.  It is always compelling when the protagonist is a mere witness to time travel instead of actually travelling himself.  In this case, Joe is very aware of the technology, and has to deal with the ramifications of not closing his loop. His future self, (Bruce Willis), escapes his execution. I can end the recap here; it’s as much as the trailer would reveal.

A few extraneous observations.  First, there was no need to make up Gordon-Levitt’s face to look like a young Bruce Willis.  It was a nice try, but not convincing enough to merit the entire movie with a star we know with a weirdly reconstructed mug.  Leaving it alone would have been just fine.  Two, there is a sub-story in Looper about people with telekinesis. I’m am wholly on board with all of that too, although wedged into a movie already set in the future featuring time travel may have been too much for one movie.

That aside.

Looper is not loop time travel.  It may want to be, but it is not.  It is also not single-string time travel.  Like The Terminator, it is a mish-mash of both experiences.  This should not sound like one of those zombie experts out there who criticize how fictional creatures behave.  Time travel is fictitious, just like the zombie outbreak.  But in the stories, rules are set.  However you want the time travel to work, we follow the story accordingly.  If it is a loop, then all events are preordained and fate is the hand that pushes the action forward.  If it is single-string, events can be changed by altering the past.  It is impossible to know if any of this is how nature would react; we can only control the stories.

Joe’s looper friend Seth lets his future self escape early in the movie.  Seth knows that the 2044 arm of the future crime syndicate will now kill him and his future self.  Seth is caught, and Future Seth is still on the loose.  To stop him, the syndicate begins to mutilate Seth, cutting off fingers, his nose, his legs; all in an attempt to debilitate Future Seth.  Gruesome and original, but in the logic of time travel, it does not jibe.  If the future version was truly handicapped by what the criminals did to his past version, he would have had no legs, fingers, and nose for the entire thirty years.  Joe scars himself later in a similar attempt to draw out his future self, and the scarring appears to Bruce Willis as brand new information.  If you are affecting a body from the past, than that means that not only is the future path affected, but it had been affected from the moment you made the change.  Follow? 

If the change can affect you, then it always has affected you.  If it can’t affect you, then…it can’t.  Movies circumvent this a little by showing changes slowly happening (Marty McFly’s photo of his family). But as we grasp these high concept movies, we have to know the rules.  Looper’s rules are just off.  I think they wanted it both ways, because the end is scene of sacrifice which works dramatically but fails the logic test again.  The question isn’t in the physics of traveling to the past and meeting yourself, it is what relationship of causality you have with one another.  If you are the traveler, do you remember this meeting when you were a young person?  If you don’t, than it is a single string occurrence.  The two truly have no connection; they are different realities of the same event, or person.  If you do remember meeting yourself from the future, you are connected and all of your actions are preordained.  The older version of you already knows how the meeting goes.

This glitch occurs in Back to the Future, too.  Remember that Marty returned to 1985 a few minutes early to save Doc from being killed by the Libyans.  He witnesses the events from earlier in the movie…escaping in the DeLorean, Doc’s murder…and then he goes down to the changed Lone Pine Mall find out Doc wore a bulletproof vest.  The Marty that Marty watched disappear in the DeLorean was not him.  It was the New Marty, the one with cool parents and a Toyota.  The teenager who we see at the end of the movie is the Original Marty, our hero, who has now assumed the life of New Marty. Fine, but where the hell is New Marty?

Both Young and Old Joe are trying to change their paths.  Young Joe needs to kill his future self to stay alive, and Old Joe needs to change the past to preserve the life of his lost love. The question that is raised is if changes in the past can be made, when exactly do the changes take place? Looper puts forth a new spin, albeit a confusing one. As a story, it works fine.  When you add in the trickier elements and consequences of time travel, things get very murky.