f13.net

See this.

That is all.

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/41488/soon.jpg)

This was excellent. Not quite what I was expecting, which was actually nice for a change.

'Looper' was REALLY good, but as with all time travel movies you can't start questioning the theory behind it too much. As Willis says in the movie '"I don't want to talk about time-travel shit because if we start, we're going to be here all day, making diagrams with straws."

Sci-fi noir worked well.

So what's the explanation for the practice of sending people back in time to get shot and presumably disposed of. Shooting people in the current time and disposing of them seems to have worked well enough for the Mob and many other people as well. It just seems like sending my dog back to 7am to eat the food I put out for him then instead of just putting another cup of food in his bowl at dinnertime.

I really enjoyed it, though the early explaination of the time travel workings rang immediate alarm bells for me, and the ending is a logic bomb; but as Mr Willis said so eloquently in the film and murdoc mentioned above, it's almost pointless trying to ruminate on the hows and whys. Fucking feat of magic from JGL to become a believable younger Bruce Willis; fantastic make-up and prosthetics too.

Yep, I agree. Turn your brain off somewhat about the time-travel.

JGL was really great at being Willis. It went beyond the make-up and he was hitting facial expressions and mannerisms.

Wow, that ending.

I have to give props to the make-up people that they avoided the trap of making JGL (age 31) look like Bruce Willis circa 1986 (age 31). In 1986, Willis was already doing Moonlighting so the temptation must be there since his image reference is so easily available. If JGL was made to look like a total ringer of 86' Willis - the results would have been pretty hilarious in the wrong way.

As a thought experiment; If this film was made in 1986 (possible since it didn't really need all that much in special effects) - could Bruce Willis be able to do JGL's role in the hypothetical 1986 version of Looper? He could do it but it would be all Bruce Willis - completely different, just like the role is completely JGL's in 2012. What I am getting at is that, although JGL adopted the minor tics and mannerisms of modern 2012 Willis; JGL intepreted the role as his own, not as a bad impression of 1986 Willis.

Did you notice the filmmakers' own message delivered by Abe (the boss) early on, expressing frustration about the movies of their present all stealing from the past? I can't find it online but he finished it with "just make something new". :-)

I want someone to do that now. I want a star in their early 30's to film parts of a movie at that age and then wait 20-25 years to film the other parts. Yes, it's stupid and and not really needed, but you know the artistic community would get swamp-panties over it.

I don't think it was their 'message' so much as a self-deferential wink at the audience given that so many of the plot mechanics, twists, and a large number of individual shots are a greatest hits of 20th century film making. This film could be an amazing spot-the-reference drinking game.

It's a great film but the plot does break down when it occasionally forces you to think about the time travel thing, particularly at the ending. Willis, JGL and Blunt are all awesome.

Bruce Willis' mission in the 'present' is brilliantly done - I love how it is introduced among ammoral characters and comes across as just another ridiculous hollywood plot, but they make it suitably icky when Willis is actually faced with what he has to do.

Also, proviso is not pronounced that way.

:oh_i_see: There. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/05/jeremiah-mcdonald-filmmaker_n_1652851.html)

Although I was thinking the other day it would be really awesome to do something like a historical dramatisation like Rome where the filming takes place over 30 or 40 years with the actors involved ageing as the figures they are playing would have. I am aware the practical difficulties involved in this would make it a nightmare, without getting into keeping funding going for an utterly unnecessary project.

Also I saw the trailer for this and dismissed it as a really stupid premise. Is it actually worth watching? Bearing in mind I don't have any problem turning my nerd brain off for films that are happy to accept that there's no depth to them.

It's a nicely plotted film noir crime drama about who we are vs. who we were vs. who we become with cyberpunky trappings that allow those three to literally meet, cooperate, and fight with one another. It gets a little bogged down in the final act, but there's a lot of clever writing and ideas througout. The first trailer didn't do it justice.

many spoilers ahead http://io9.com/5949973/looper-director-rian-johnson-is-live-on-io9-and-taking-your-questions (http://io9.com/5949973/looper-director-rian-johnson-is-live-on-io9-and-taking-your-questions)

Very cool stuff.  Hate how he declines to answer the Abe/Kid loop stuff.  :tantrum:

They were just showing you what the original timeline was like.

Just saw it tonight, and really enjoyed the hell out of it.  This is good classic Sci-fi right here.  Its not a movie about time travel, its a human story that happens to involve time travel.  This is the sort of movie I was hoping In Time would be (but it failed horribly at).  Can't really think of anything in particular I wanted them to do differently.


Yeah, that.

Well clearly. It just needed to be clear they were doing that at the time.

True, it confused the shit out of me when they did it.  But I'm not sure how they could of done it without making it look retarded or painfully long.

Easy the movie could have gone through the first timeline without going for the fake out.

Anyway, I think it would interesting to have a movie like this protagonist keeps getting reset because he keeps fucking up causality.  Add a thing where every reset breaks his mind and the universe a little bit more.  Like ultra-violet Groundhogs Day.

You just described The Butterfly Effect (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0289879/).

--Dave

I thought Kelso was just failing to get the causality he wanted not actually breaking causality.

Just saw this, excellent movie, but some of the time travel stuff made my head hurt.


Also, obligatory:

could HAVE
:mob:

Just saw this, great movie. I'm going to just be spoilery since it's been out so long but I didn't see any real issues with the time travel.

Same. It works.

Hated the last 20 minutes or so. Loved everything else.

I disliked that they left the gun on the mantle with the kid and the king-maker arc (which was a big part of why that last 20 minutes sucked).  Other than that, it was a good flick.

--Dave

What didn't you guys like about the last 20 minutes?

Is this the one about Big Bird going to the grocery store?

The movie was about selfishness and the cycles we repeat, sort of violence begets violence except with greed.  Everyone is greedy in the film, mothers and their children, husbands and their wives etc etc. For this I thought the ending was fine, it was all about ending the cycle, not just of the future but doing so with the single selfless act of the film.  I suppose you could argue with how they set the ending up but I thought it happened in the right way.

My minor nitpick

I couldn't get past why the future needed anyone in the past - just drop the mark in the middle of the pacific ocean.

That would make the time machine itself have to be put somewhere out in the ocean, I'm assuming that was not feasible for some reason, plus you do want control of what you sent back into the past.  Sure you an safely assuming sending someone back into the past 1000feet in the air would likely die but why take the chance?
One future person running loose can fuck your entire operation.

So there is one in the future and one in the past that are linked?  Got it, from the trailer it just looks like he just appears in the middle of a field.

The time machines are only in the future.  They can only deposit the traveler in the same location as the machine though, and they're only one way. 

No, they seem to imply that the machine can send things back in time, but cannot move things through space.  So that spot in the field where the people appear is where they build the machine in the future. I guess that means that when Old Joe is grabbed in China, they fly him all the way back to Wherever, USA to send him back in time.  Which I guess is fine, since iirc they never really show what happens in between the grab and getting to the machine.

As for why kill in the past at all, the difficulty the mob was trying to circumvent wasn't so much the killing, it was disposing of the bodies.  "Tracking technology has rendered it nearly impossible to dispose of bodies secretly, so when crime bosses want to eliminate a target they send them back to the past to be killed by 'loopers'".  Obviously it's still a somewhat flimsy premise (I'm pretty sure Walter White figured out a better method  :grin:) but it's internally consistent within the movie and there wouldn't be a movie at all without it.

Oh.  I have to say it makes me a little sad that the screen writer has no appreciation for Mother Earth's revolving, precessing and wobbling around Mr Sun.

Why not build the machine on a volcano? Or in space?

That might be a little hard for the mafia to hide from the authorities.

Yeah, what the hell was H.G. Wells thinking when he used the same idea in the very first time travel story ever written?

True. But it would add a very Dr. Evil flare to the story.

Yeah, the impression I got is that it was an accident (I thought I recalled an oh shit look on their faces).  Looked like they tried to time it for when they thought he was alone.

With the entire town being run by the time travel mob and the loopers not being too discrete when they are out celebrating, I would guess that it's an open secret, at least in that general area of the world.

I thought that was the only egregious red herring in the film--I assumed the moment she said "oh you're a looper" that she was a looper too and that we'd find out that there's someone else looping besides the mob. Or there's two mobs. Or something--I was expecting it to mean something, and it never did.

Otherwise I thought it all made a pretty good amount of sense. Yeah, sure, the whole 'gotta kill them in the past so that the tracker doesn't trigger' thing doesn't stand up to any scrutiny--what, the world government has trackers on everyone that records the time of death but they don't notice when someone just disappears outright? "Yeah, we're going to track everyone in case of a homicide but we don't track them for any other reason. If you get lost in the forest and we need to find you, you're out of luck, because we don't use this technology for any other reason besides finding illegally killed corpses."

I filed it under 'they don't want to spend 10 minutes explaining this shit again'.

Abe and Old Joe had done a good job of making clear that no one is going to discuss the premise, and it is not the point of the film. So I was ready to see it glossed over with Blunt.

The premise falls apart on every level if you subject it to even a little thought. Even Back to the Future makes more sense.

I saw this on a flight this week.  Great movie.  The trailers did a great job of intriguing one enough to maybe go see it but didn't give anything away.  I thought the Bruce Willis crying scene didn't need to be there, but I understand why someone might have thought it was necessary.

And Emily Blunt looks really hot in farm girl clothes. 

Yeah, the whole 'fixed location in time travel' thing doesn't even vaguely work out, since we're hurtling through space at a sizable fraction of the speed of light right now.  If you blinked out of time and reappeared a second later, the planet would have moved by almost a thousand miles, with predictable bad results for you.  But that's something that has to be hand-waved away for the sake of the movie.

I quite liked Looper, it gave me a very Terminator vibe, but with the implacable killer from the future actually having a very good motivation for doing what he's doing.

The concept of a fixed and absolute reference point in space itself is a little iffy.  One of our resident physicists may want to correct me on that.

If it makes you feel better, imagine that the Earth's magnetic field acts as a necessary anchor for the time travel field, and so as you go back in time you remain tethered to the same spot you were in relative to that.  30 years isn't enough time for the poles to drift very far and so you end up in the same spot relative to the surface of the Earth.

Four of these words are redundant.

Coordinate systems are abstract and relative to where you fix your origin.  Adding in time and how many other dimensions necessary to get time travel to work would just make it that much more of a headache to determine, but presumably they could predict where the earth will be, or was, at some exact point in time.  (They did show the loopers knowing exactly when the target would appear.)

Consider the accuracy we can use to put satellites into orbit around other planets then add fifty years and sci-fi problem-solving.  Easy.

This is why I have a problem with the basic premise.  No receiver on the point in spacetime in the past implies that they pick the point in spacetime that they want to open a wormhole to.  But that immediately takes me off the rails, because if they can pick the point in spacetime, why not just have it not on the planet.  No need to setup a gunman on the other side, just drop the (now dead) dude into space.  Yes, I get that it invalidates the whole premise of the movie. Conversely, this is why the movie seems stupid to me and makes me have zero interest in seeing it.

I don't know why I'm so anal about time travel stories needing to be somewhat scientifically consistent, yet I'll give almost any super hero flick the "I'm in!"

Even then the majority of time travel plots rely on a scene where the control circuit blows up and places the protagonist and/or antagonist at a semi-random point in space/time - and then OH NO the machine won't work again until the third act.

Lucky that random point involved some nice open space where ground level was exactly as expected and nobody had parked a car.

Or in the case of Looper, if they are that accurate, why not beam the live bodies directly into the furnace.



I didn't have an issue with Looper, but you can't make time travel premises work except by skating past them and ignoring them outside of the first and last scene.

Hiro Nakamura demonstrated that even time stopping is broken as fuck and will destroy any story if you let people think about it.

Its like Inception, the pseudoscience isn't there to studied, but as a backdrop for interesting situations for stories. Now compare that to how Heroes used time time travel I.E. Dues Ex Machina I.E. very lame.

Fuck, even Harry Potter got screwed up once everyone learned to teleport about the place.

I think Primer might be the only time travel film to take time travel seriously.

(Speaking of which, why has that film had such limited distribution lately? No current DVD available and it's been hard to get on streaming services. I think Netflix and Amazon have it now but they didn't for a long time.)

Quick derail, did Heroes get an ending or does it end on a cliffhanger ?

I'm not sure on Heroes.  I only saw up to part of the aborted second season.  I never picked it up again once it came back on.

Yeah, time travel does much with things.  I didn't mind it in Looper simply because they acknowledged that it causes all sorts of problems.  "We'll be drawing diagrams and shit all day."

The story itself I liked, and the time travel was just a way to set scenes.

Cliffhanger of sorts, after Sylar's redemption by saving New York from Earthquake Man and his super-powered freak show, Claire decides to take a header from the top of the ferris wheel in front of the news cameras, followed by 'To Be Continued'.  So all the major arcs got tied off.

Just finished watching through it all on Hulu.

--Dave

So yeah, the nerd details didn't really work for me, but the writing more or less acknowledged the fact and moved on, so I was okay with it because time travel, much like FTL space travel, is problematical enough to derail almost any story under the technical details.  The story was swell, the characters all had good motivation for what they were doing, nothing was particularly black and white, I enjoyed it.

Is it realistic to use a Delorean as a time travel car? Or would you get less chrono-interference if you used a VW Golf instead?

A Delorean makes sense being all-steel.  Stronger frame and better conductive properties. ;D

Plus, if you are gonna time travel, you might as well do it with a bit of style.  :oh_i_see:



Christ we are such nerds...

http://video.adultswim.com/robot-chicken/a-delorian.html

"You had your chance, you judgmental prick!"

Bump. Just watched this. (UNMARKED SPOILERS)

Have pretty mixed feelings about it. I really hated the ominous powerful kid. It's just such an overused trope and those kids are always the worst part of whatever movie they are in. It didn't help that in the end when he levitates Bruce Willis and his mom that it looks super fake and almost purposefully comical. (The effects as a whole were pretty bad)

I'm not sure how I feel about the conversation in the diner about time travel that is basically "don't try to make sense out of it it doesn't make sense." I guess that's better than trying to make it make sense when it doesn't, but it still feels very strange for a movie to basically come out and say that the central premise is nonsense that's not worth seriously considering.

The zapping people back to the past thing is just dumb. Even if you can't zap them into space or into a tar pit in 70 million BC why would you zap someone back to have them killed by themselves? Why not have person A kill future person B and vice-versa, rather than giving each looper a strong incentive not to waste to the people sent back since they might be them?

My biggest disappointment was that the fact that Bruce Willis was the future JGL didn't really matter except for the ending and carving the message into his arm. He could have just been some unrelated person from the future and it wouldn't have changed much. (Except for how the ending was resolved obviously) At no point did JGL really consider what it meant for this guy to be his future self. You'd think that pointing a gun at your future self and pulling the trigger would cause some sort of emotional or psychological upheaval.

Seems like a missed opportunity to ruminate on some existential questions, which is what I thought the movie would be about. Is yourself from the future any different from just any other random person?

Finally...it would be hilarious to have some sort of post-credits or alternate ending where it's revealed that the kid's mother lives and beats him horribly, and that's why he grows up to be evil. So that the self-sacrifice of JGL is actually what causes the Rainmaker to exist. Or something like that. There's really no reason to believe that what JGL did would prevent the Rainmaker from existing, and not either have no effect or actually be the cause.

Yeah, but Emily Blunt chopping wood is HOT!

Indeed. They touch on it a bit, but I think there's a fascinating movie just in:

"Wow I was such a loser when I was young. This kid is responsible for every mistake I've ever made."
"Wow I am such a loser when I'm old. Everything I wanted to accomplish in my life and I wind up as this guy?"

Yeah. It's weird because apparently the inspiration for the movie was the idea of a young man and his older self squaring off, but that's a minor part of the movie as whole.

As I said before, the fact that the guy who goes back in time meets himself in the past is almost incidental. He's not going back in time to kill himself or to protect himself, and them meeting doesn't have a lot of psychological ramifications. The specifics of how Willis is defeated only work because of their relationship, but if JGL just like set off a bomb that killed Bruce Willis and himself together it would be basically the same movie.

I suppose it's not fair to hold what the movie isn't against it, but there definitely is an interesting movie to be made about meeting your future self and clashing with them.

Here's a random thought: the way the ending works JGL sacrifices himself to stop the creation of the Rainmaker - to stop the kid from turning evil. This should also prevent his future Asian wife from being killed I would assume. So what if instead of killing himself primarily to help the kid he did it primarily to help his wife. (That he doesn't actually know) It's the same ending with a different perspective - he's a fuckup and is going to meet this woman who rehabilitates him, and in killing himself he helps her and also in some way fulfills the wishes of his future self.

Maybe I like that better just because I found the kid really annoying.