MovieChat Forums > Looper (2012) Discussion > List the things that don't make sense

List the things that don't make sense

posted 8 years ago by elliest_5
12 replies | jump to latest

There's loads. Let's make a list:

1. In a universe where the time travel model is a loop (as opposed to alt timelines) the loop can't break, so Bruce Willis would never get to the execution point without a hood & untied.No new marks or memories could appear.

2. The people who set this up had lots of risk and no gain by sending loopers to be offed by their past selves instead of sending them to a looper who is NOT their past self.

3. [ignoring point 1 and assuming alt/rewritten timelines can exist in this universe] escaped Bruce Willis comes from a timeline where Emily Blunt doesn't get killed by a looper (maybe she gets killed in a completely unrelated event or doesn't get killed at all, since the rumour that the Rainmaker saw his mum get killed is already confirmed by the event with the woman he originally called mum) so preventing her death may prevent adult Cid from becoming MORE evil than he already is, but it won't prevent him from becoming as evil as he already is.

[–] rainofwalrus 8 years ago

1. In a universe where the time travel model is a loop (as opposed to alt timelines) the loop can't break, so Bruce Willis would never get to the execution point without a hood & untied.No new marks or memories could appear.

All time-travel is a loop. Even Branching Alt-Timelines. Even Rewind-the-Tape Monotube. If a prescient has looped back on itself, a loop has been established. Now, there are flavors of loop, granted. But there's a flaw in your analysis from the jump.

2. The people who set this up had lots of risk and no gain by sending loopers to be offed by their past selves instead of sending them to a looper who is NOT their past self.

Kill your younger self and you vanish, solving the Rogue Prescient problem. Kill a stranger and ABE has two problems instead of one: Running Loop AND Dead Stranger.

Insisting that nobody will ever run their loop because a stranger was used is like saying nobody will ever get wet if they're holding an umbrella. See: Murphy's Law.

3. [ignoring point 1 and assuming alt/rewritten timelines can exist in this universe] escaped Bruce Willis comes from a timeline where Emily Blunt doesn't get killed by a looper (maybe she gets killed in a completely unrelated event or doesn't get killed at all, since the rumour that the Rainmaker saw his mum get killed is already confirmed by the event with the woman he originally called mum) so preventing her death may prevent adult Cid from becoming MORE evil than he already is, but it won't prevent him from becoming as evil as he already is.

And it's just a rumor anyway. A figment from a distant future. Even if OLD JOE kills Sara in front of Cid and YOUNG JOE, we still can't prove this is the rainmaker_catalyst. Killing Gatman Jessie could be the catalyst, for example. And there aren't even rumors about that.

Enjoy these words, for one day they'll be gone... All of them.

[–] 8 years ago

[deleted]

[–] thelostmachine 8 years ago

01. if Cid is Joe why doesn't Joe have a synthetic jaw or scar from being shot in the face.

02. if Cid is Joe why doesn't Joe have super dooper TK? and use it for work in China and to save his wife.

03. The boy Joe almost hit with the car when they left the club... is Seth. If so why was that thrown in there?

{but I didn't just kill ya, I cut ya up into little pieces} -Jack

[–] thelostmachine 8 years ago

01. If it's that hard to dispose of a body in the future then why is it that when the hit men come for future Joe that one of them shoots and kills his wife?

[–] rainofwalrus 8 years ago

01. If it's that hard to dispose of a body in the future then why is it that when the hit men come for future Joe that one of them shoots and kills his wife?

This isn't a problem.

It's easy to murder in the Future, Cid/Rainmaker depends on it. But at some point, it becomes impossible "to get away with it" due to Tagging; which means you can't trick the courts based on this pristine tagging data.

So, the Asian Wife is dead.

And the courts cannot be tricked (she was shot and killed). But she also has an ex-mafia husband who is now missing (and not shot and killed; per the Tagging System) and becomes the prime suspect, overshadowing the randomness of the truth.

Enjoy these words, for one day they'll be gone... All of them.

[–] love_cats_hate_dogs 8 years ago

If "adjusted" Old Seth has stumps for legs how does he run away from Young Seth? If he has no tongue how can he sweet talk Young Seth into getting untied? If he is a mutilated freak who can't even talk wouldn't that drastically affect basically every action he made in the 30 years between closing his loop and getting sent back pretty much the same as just killing Young Seth since his Looping career has come to its natural end at that point anyway?

--------------------------------
Hitler was a dog person.

[–] rainofwalrus 8 years ago

If "adjusted" Old Seth has stumps for legs how does he run away from Young Seth? If he has no tongue how can he sweet talk Young Seth into getting untied? If he is a mutilated freak who can't even talk wouldn't that drastically affect basically every action he made in the 30 years between closing his loop and getting sent back pretty much the same as just killing Young Seth since his Looping career has come to its natural end at that point anyway?

The "adjustments" only exist in the newly modified Running Loop, a pocket reality unlike the iteration prior. It's the magic of "The Dynamic Now" once Nested Loops have become a thing.

The trick is remembering that none of it is possible, so no one event within a running loop should be any stranger than the next. It still follows a linear flow of flux, complete with "adjustments" in real-time (Modified Now).

Enjoy these words, for one day they'll be gone... All of them.

[–] brakerules 8 years ago

The people who set this up had lots of risk by sending alive people in the past ( and not only the older selves of the loopers) to be killed there by the loopers.
Why didn't they kill the older loopers and the persons who wanted to get rid off in their own time and then sent the bodies for disposal in the past; This is something that I honestly don't get it.. 

They would have avoided the risk of someone escaping in the past time alive able to influence the future, or the possibility that a looper wouldn't want to kill his older self ( as it happened )

Another thing that makes no sense at all is the ending that cancels everything before. Beyond the various inconsistencies that were discussed on other threads, can someone explain to me please the following please:

Joe goes back in time and before his younger self commits suicide and vanish him to nothing, he has already killed countless people, the loopers gang, the two other children and who knows who else ( I've lost the counting) something that is impossible to happen by the time that this guy died young. So there is not old Joe to go back in time and kill them and so these people should remain alive.

Same with the looper that was hiding in Joe's vault. How is it possible to had an older self that was sent back to him at some point to kill him, by the time that we see later that due to this action was caught and killed while he was still young? The older shelf of a person, couldn't be the reason of the death of the same person's younger self.

[–] rainofwalrus 8 years ago

They would have avoided the risk of someone escaping in the past time alive able to influence the future, or the possibility that a looper wouldn't want to kill his older self ( as it happened )

Technically, sending a "dead body" back also influences The Future. And no plan is fool-proof. No paradigm is perfect. Errors are a Universal constant, we call this Murphy's Law.

So the risk of influencing The Future can only be avoided if The Past isn't messed with.

Another thing that makes no sense at all is the ending that cancels everything before.

There's the rub: Nothing but the Visiting Double (lets call him OLD JOE) is vanished in the end. Everything the Visiting Double (lets call this one, OLD SETH) does prior to vanishing/killed is lasting. There is no retrospective rewind-the-tape and undo the changes made AFTER OLD JOE vanishes.

OLD is tethered to the outcome(s) of YOUNG *only* while in the Running Loop. The vanishing is a self-consistent process; and local/micro.

Visiting Double magically appears in This Now;
Visiting Double magically disappears in This Now;

The change(s), Universally, are very micro.

Enjoy these words, for one day they'll be gone... All of them.

[–] edbuskirkjr 7 years ago

Once you start thinking about it, there are far too many to list, and the more you think about it, the more you'll come up with.

[–] osualdo 7 years ago

The ending is the worst, it really makes no sense whatsoever and is a self-confused, cliched, plot-holed mess.
Up until that point it was going well and a little suspension of disbelief was working well.

[–] johnsonium 7 years ago

1. It's a loop but not a closed loop. There's nothing in the movie to indicate that the future is unavoidable, ala Twelve Monkeys. In fact, the future is changed regularly throughout the movie. It's consistent.

2. There's one thing to gain: intimidation. If you see your 30-year older self appear you will likely realize that it's useless to try and avoid your fate. This makes capturing and eliminating the loopers in the future easier. It's a way to keep them in line.

Old Joe was an exception as he decided to try anyway and came up with a plan to do so (turn away, use gold as armor, throw gold at Young Joe).

3. It's assumed that Blunt was killed in some other way in the previous timeline, setting Cid on his way to becoming the Rainmaker. Because of the intervention of Young and Old Joe that fate is altered to the point that she doesn't get killed in the other manner.

Also, we don't really know whether Cid will or will not still become the Rainmaker. We're led to believe he won't but it's not shown either way. In any event, it doesn't matter because there's no Joe to grow old and tangle with him. There's no indication that the Rainmaker causes any problems outside of organized crime circles. Also, Old Joe's Chinese wife will never have met him and thus won't be killed either.

My biggest problems are:

-Wouldn't old Seth remember how he was disfigured as a young man and decide to not try to escape? Of course, if that happened then the next loop young Seth wouldn't have been disfigured and the whole thing would start again.

-Playing with time like this would be highly dangerous and unpredictable. The slightest change caused by the looper program could easily cause the entire program to cease to exist. We saw one way that could happen with Old Joe wiping out the entire management team.

-If everything hinged on the Rainmaker, wouldn't he have sent people back in time to protect and watch after his younger self?