Looper

[Mazakiel]

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. 

[Nevermore]

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.

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  ) but it's internally consistent within the movie and there wouldn't be a movie at all without it.

[Typhon]

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. 

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.

[Paelos]

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

[Teleku]

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

[Nevermore]

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. 

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.

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

[Paelos]

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

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

[Surlyboi]

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

[Teleku]

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.

[Koyasha]

[cironian]

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.

[Ruvaldt]

[Khaldun]

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."

[eldaec]

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.

[shiznitz]

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. 

[Kitsune]

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.

[Samwise]

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.

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.

[eldaec]

And Emily Blunt looks really hot in farm girl clothes. 

Four of these words are redundant.

[Lantyssa]

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.

[Typhon]

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!"

[eldaec]

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

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.

[tazelbain]

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.

[eldaec]

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

[Khaldun]

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.)

[Der Helm]

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

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

[Lantyssa]

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.

[MahrinSkel]

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

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

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

[Kitsune]

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.

[UnSub]

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?

[Lantyssa]

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

[Sir T]

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



Christ we are such nerds...

[eldaec]

A Delorean makes sense being all-steel.  Stronger frame and better conductive flux-dispersion... LOOK OUT!

[Merusk]

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

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

"You had your chance, you judgmental prick!"

[Margalis]

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.

[shiznitz]

Yeah, but Emily Blunt chopping wood is HOT!