The year is 2044.
Time travel has not yet been invented. But 30 years from now, it will have been. It will be instantly outlawed, used only in secret by the largest criminal organisations…
That’s right, this time I’ve been watching the second best Bruce Willis Time Travel movie, the action movie in sci-fi garb that is, Rian Johnson’s Looper. First up, a little warning: Looper is pretty graphic and violent. It’s rated R/15. So there may be inappropriate images and so on for younger readers…
If you haven’t seen Looper yet, and you’re over 15, you can go find it on Amazon, or Netflix (depending on region and availability). It’s even currently free on Amazon Prime (at least in the UK). Go on, I’ll wait….You won’t miss anything, and we are going to spoil the whole thing as we peel it apart for the juicy Watsonian evidence within.
So, you’ve either now seen it, had already seen it, or don’t care — excellent, now let’s pull this movie apart.
First off, let’s start at the beginning, or one of them, anyway.
The Beginning
The movie opens with our first glance at Time-Travel. Well, first, Joseph Gordon-Levitt copys a French language course as he looks at a watch. Then he shoots a time-traveller with a Blunderbuss (well a short barrelled shotgun, but never mind).
The time-traveller appears at a specific time, without even the soft pop of air displacement. No real special effect, just a quick fade and a scream. There’s no electrical disturbances, no wormhole, no sense of motion–which instantly tells us something about how time travel works in the Looperverse, but we’ll come back to that later.
Next, we get the “Time travel has not yet been invented,” speech, which opens more plot holes than it closes by suggesting that tagging technology in the future is so good that it can stop people committing murder, but kidnappings are still fairly easily accomplished. It also tells us that even in 2074 there are people who believe prohibition of something is a valid method of control.
A number of points are established during this exposition though.
- Loopers are assassins (although they are more technically an executioner).
- Loopers are paid in silver strapped to the back of the victim (and covered with a tan suede or leather coat for some reason).
- Loopers dispose of the bodies, and seem to have their disposal sites all picked out.
Next we get to see a bit of Joseph’s, sorry, Joe’s life.
It ticks a number of dystopian boxes: life being cheap; everything looks bleak, decayed and largely post-industrial; Joe dresses in a retro 90s style (even driving in a pristine Mark 1 Mazda MX5).
Only his friend Seth has anything new-looking, a ‘Slatbike’ which he can’t get to start. We also hear and see the TKs, mutants with the ability to float coins.
None of which is pertinent to time travel, so I’ll do my best to ignore it. Also not really pertinent is the fact that we find out that Young Joseph is a Junkie, regularly dosing himself on psycho-active eye drops that seem very expensive and have horrific withdrawal symptoms for what looks like the effect of being drunk. Who knows if one, or both, will become pertinent later, right?
Closing Your Loop
Anyway, next we find out about Closing Your Loop. When a Looper kills themselves, they are given a golden handshake (well, backpack) and let off their contract for the thirty years until someone invents time travel and they get sent back.
Apparently Loopers sign up fully aware of this clause in the contract. Joe acknowledges that they aren’t the most forward-thinking of people. But even so, it seems a pretty ridiculous set up to volunteer into (although we do find out later that Joe didn’t exactly volunteer).
As he’s telling us this, and the next few scenes, we do learn some more details that point, clue-like, at the method of time-travel used.
- The people in the future know where they are sending the victim; they know which Looper is going to be receiving themselves. Each Looper has a separate location that they ‘patrol,’ so you can be sent yourself for retirement, and which legally makes their death a suicide, I guess.
- Time travel is so illegal that they close four loops in a month because of a change of power in the future, and it barely gets a passing mention. Honestly, Loopers seem to be disposable in 2044. They actually celebrate their ‘retirement’ with the other Loopers before they leave.
- Loopers are just told a time when they have a job to do. Joe always returns to the exact same spot for every kill. We even see him adjust the position of the tarpaulin over the course of the movie to make the Victims arrive closer to the front. Joe is a known regular to the waitresses in the nearby diner. He must kill people almost daily, at least weekly, to be accepted as a regular.
This leads to…
Letting Your Loop Run
Seth lets his Loop run. He doesn’t kill himself; instead, he listens. We hear about some holy terror boss man in the future who is closing all the loops, when Young Seth comes to Joe asking for help.
Joe is taken to Abe, the guy from the future who runs the operation. Abe threatens Joe with losing half of his cash, after exposing some of Joe’s backstory: Joe rolled one of their fronts, a watch shop — Oh, is that where the watch came from — as a kid, fresh off a train, and was given a job as a Looper, almost as a punishment, but Abe says he was saving Joe from a worse future. A worse future than being a Looper? Wow.
Joe gives up Seth to Abe.
Which is when we see Old Seth, who is on the run, and notices an arrow scar on his palm, he stares in astonishment, or possibly horror, and pulls at his sleeve…
Old Seth then starts losing fingers, and looks terrified, understandably enough. As they are slicing bits off his younger self.
I’m sure some people actually yelled, “Paradox!” during this scene. How can he suddenly notice a missing finger? It should have been like that for years for him. If you didn’t think it then, you must have yelled it when his leg vanished and he fell in the street, right? It doesn’t make sense. Causality is broken. If he lost his leg when he was younger how did he drive, or walk into the middle of the street? But, of course, that isn’t actually a Paradox, we just watched it happen, and know how he got there, and what we see is a humongous clue as to the nature of time travel used, and the laws of the Looperverse.
It tells us that the Looperverse is neither a fixed chronology universe (as we see changes happening), nor is it a multiverse (as nothing done to Younger versions should affect older version in a Multiverse).
It might be a simulation. It would easily explain everything (especially the TK), but feels wrong as there’s no hints that point to it as a valid solution. So we have to discount it. We could be looking at another Zero-Worlds solution, perhaps, but it seems unlikely given the nature of the injury occurring to both Old and Younger Seths at the same time. A Zero-World’s Seth would have suddenly had Prosthesis to explain the continuity. His personal history would mutate to absorb the change.
What we see next really pins it down.
Old Joe
Now’s the time the movie really kicks off, and begins to explain itself, as Bruce Willis arrives from the future.
He is late.
Take a moment to let that settle in. Old Joe does not arrive on time — in a time-travel movie. This immediately tells us something very important. However the time machine works, the targeting system is relative to the firing time. They could dial back a certain number of years and days and hit a tarpaulin in a field, but once the machine is set, or charged, or whatever, when it triggers it will move him back a precise number of seconds.
Old Joe is late, because Old Joe sent himself back in time, after freeing himself from the black hats of the future Crime Syndicate. Because he sent himself back, Old Joe has an edge on young Joe, his head isn’t covered in a sack, and he can look himself in the eye.
So Joseph pauses, and Bruce turns, takes the shot on his gold armoured back, and then hits Young Joseph with a gold bar and then a punch.
We follow Young Joe as he heads back to town, finds his life destroyed and then falls out of a window and off a fire escape.
And something weird happens…
We cut back to the field and Young Joseph watching his watch countdown to his own arrival again.
Wait… what happened there?
An Actual Temporal Paradox?!
That’s right, Young Joe probably just died. He died, and suddenly there wasn’t an Old Joe who could arrive back. Okay, maybe he didn’t die from the fall, but was found by Kid Blue after he was let out of the safe, and died right after. Either way, history just stopped making sense. How could a Loop run and cause this mess if he died? Well, he couldn’t.
A grandfather paradox happened and resolved itself right in front of us. A whole potential future just cancelled itself out, and the universe reset to the last stable point, which in this case is just before Bruce Willis arrived.
Some people may say that what we are seeing here is actually a Flashback to Old Joe’s past to allow us to understand his point of view, which is fine, and maybe what Rian Johnson intended, but so far, we have followed a continuous timeline through the movie. Therefore the most likely explanation is that what we observe is actually happening. The universe cannot resolve Young Joe’s death, with Old Joe being its indirect cause, so it resets, and we watch Joe arrive again.
He’s still late (he has to be, as this is the last moment the universe was stable), but this time arrives with his head sacked, and gets blown away by Young Joseph. Why does he arrive late with his head sacked? It really is the only way the universe can make sense of what happened (and is also what points away from this being Old Joe’s flashback). This new potential timeline didn’t let Old Joe escape, his Loop was closed. We can imagine, as did the late Stephen Hawking, in a Chronology Protection Agency that hastily erected a potential future for this new point. A subtle difference, here or there. Perhaps his Young Joe went to France, after all. It doesn’t matter, as Bruce later explains, as it is only a potential future at this point.
If that Old Joe had lived it might have made a difference again, but instead he dies. His Loop Closed, Young Joe retires…
(Slightly less convincingly than most Werewolf transformations.)
30 Years fly by so quickly and we watch Old Joe struggle free and send himself back. Which also means we briefly see the machine.
We know where this is going already, don’t we? Young Joe is going to hesitate and…
Old Joe’s Point Of View
Except now we are following Old Joe instead of Young Joe, as we see what happened from his point of view. We also see Old Joe is suffering a little from his time-travel jaunt. He seems to have a pretty bad headache, and it gets worse from time time to time —
And we see Old Joe remember Young Joe stamping on his phone. A thing we watched Young Joe do earlier in the movie. That flashback seems to burn its way into Old Joe’s Bruce Willis shaped head.
Another clue! The memory forming in Young Joe’s mind was suddenly placed into Old Joe’s memories. Those are not the memories he has, he remembers himself being dead. Everything that is happening is destroying his own memory of events, literally rewriting his own brain. No wonder he has a headache, he’s lucky that he can function at all. This also explains the pain that Old Seth was feeling, it was literally the pain of the limb being suddenly missing, as well as the rewriting of the neurons that would have carried all those memories and coincidentally the pain messages that Young Seth was processing at the same time.
This is the reason that Jeff Daniels’ Abe character is so insistent at Joe needing to go to China, later in the film. He remembers Joe going to China. This is probably why he winces when Joe says France, as he expects a memory to get stabbed in his head, when that doesn’t happen he more confidently insists that Joe will go to China. He’s not messing in his own history too much, (not as much as Old Joe) who is ripping apart his own memories, but little surprises like this may get him from time to time. It means that Abe knew, or at least knew of, Joe before he came back in time, which means he recruited Young Joe probably thinking he was changing the future.
We know how they deal with a Loop running normally, restricting the potential futures the Old Looper might be from with surgery. Hell, they even have the Doctor on call.
Old Joe knows this, he remembers this.
Old Joe doesn’t leave Young Joe to get killed, or captured and surgically tortured, instead he drags him away.
We have almost all the clues we need to classify the time machine and the Temporal Mechanics of the Looperverse.
And unlike Joe’s suggestion, we don’t need to make diagrams with straws on the table of the diner to do it. Joe actually spells out the final clue we need in that diner conversation himself.
He can’t really remember the future. His own past he can remember, to a point. It is foggy and indistinct — he can remember his wife (and still has her picture in his watch) as this is part of his personal history (we watched it happen), but he can only remember the changes that are happening as they happen, and little after that, probably beyond the disjointed series of memories that we actually watched. We know exactly as much as Old Joe about what is happening to him now. But that is enough to pin everything down.
The Looperverse
Time travel in the Looperverse appears to be a Quantum phenomena. It extends from the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, in that there is a single timeline, but events exist in a state of Quantum Uncertainty until they are observed. Now there are some interesting issues that the universe raises here. The observers’ temporal state is important to their understanding of events.
While they are displaced in time they suffer from a macro-temporal state similar to Quantum Superposition. They have to exist in the past as a result of all potential futures from the moment they are in. They may remember specific details from their previous existence only up to the point when that memory is no longer possible. This means they may walk around on a leg that may yet be surgically removed in their own past, only up until the moment that the leg is actually removed. Then all potential futures that include the leg are removed, and they must collapse to the ground.
This is similar to how the previous iteration of the universe collapsed when it negated its own history by killing Young Joe as a direct result of Old Joe running around. The universe immediately adapted to return to its last previously stable moment, immediately before Old Joe’s arrival.
This is a universe built on valid causal relationships, but includes strange Quantum-like behaviour, where things can be observed that later become impossible to have been observed. Like particles interfering with themselves in wave-like but impossible for particle ways. I’m going to assume that some of this Quantum instability is a result of the method of time-travel used.
The time machine we saw in the future looks like a jury rigged cement mixer, with extra wires, that contains a wire mesh or grid. The device when triggered seems to glow red-orange and then the transference in time and space takes place. I discussed earlier what this method of time travel isn’t, so what does that leave us?
How To Loop
Sending someone back in time is a complicated business. You end up creating timelines that require diagramming with straws and models.
Sometimes the travel takes time and would be represented by a single straw being bent back on itself. That’s not what we have here, and you can sweep the table clear of all straws.
The moment you travel back in time in Looper, your future, the one you are from, is utterly destroyed. You are the only proof that it ever existed, and the longer you spend back in the past, the more that universe is destroyed. It is possible that you can destroy the future entirely, removing possibilities until none remain, and then time will rewind back to the last stable position.
When this happens, the time traveller doesn’t remember the deleted potential universes. They once again have knowledge only of the remaining potential futures.
So how can this happen? Best I can work out, rather than relying on closed time-like curves to project a causality onto the past, the Looper is instead Quantum Teleported to a Space-Time location in the past.
That is to say, their atoms and electrons are Quantum Entangled by the device and then this information is projected to another point in Space-Time, where it arranges the matter and energy present then into a reasonable facsimile of the original. The original body is destroyed by pulling the information out for broadcast.
I’m afraid I can only guess at how the time machine targets a particular area on a particular day, but I suspect each machine has its own target location, and the machines have a fixed temporal range. So if you want to send someone back to Seth you have to use the Seth machine (wherever it is currently installed). The machine is probably targeted by a patch of soil (or similar) from the location, allowing it to be tracked back in time via the rules of both Quantum Entanglement and the magickal Principle of Contagion.
The causality of the subject is therefore in a state of superposition, this explains a lot of how the subjects memories are unavailable and spontaneously collapse their own waveforms as their history is altered.
That Ending Though
So that’s it, mystery solved, we have a solution that seems to work for…
Well, that’s awkward.
Why didn’t the universe just reset when Young Joe just hugged blunderbuss?
The universe should have reset, shouldn’t it?
Well, let me think about it for a moment… Hang on… I think this has to do with Young Joe’s reasons (and not Rian’s lack of understanding of the rules he established).
The first time he dies it is as a direct result of his reacting to the Older version of himself. He is effectively killed by the other Loopers because of Old Joe. This time it is because he chooses to end his own life, for his own reasons. However, it would have made more sense to cut back to the field again and have Young Joe shoot himself before Old Joe could appear. That would have been a more satisfying ending, at least for me.
Instead, we’re left with a rather messy ending that changes nothing about the future. Seriously, this is not a good ending at all.
The Rainmaker will still rise to power (he did when Old Joe was dead on arrival, so it wasn’t Joe that made Cid into the Rainmaker), the idea he’ll be good is based on the idea that Old Joe partially succeeded, but we know the Rainmaker was opposed to the Loopers even in the timeline where Old Joe died right away.
All Joe’s info about the Rainmaker only appears to make sense to Young Joe later when the kid is shot in the face, and his mother is threatened. It makes no sense from the history that Old Joe lived through, as none of it could have happened the way it’s about too.
TL;DR
Looper is not really a deep time travel movie, it is not based on any real science, but a lot of hand-waving and an idea of causality that is probably physically impossible, is quite outlandish and very difficult to explain within classical physics.
From a certain Quantum Entangled perspective it is, perhaps, not as badly stitched together as some would have you believe, but fundamentally the story is flawed by the lack of true resolution for the Rainmaker plot (which I have done my best to avoid as it really isn’t important to the time travel), and the lack of importance of the Joe character to the Rainmaker’s rise to power.
So there really is no resolution in Young Joe’s sacrifice. It is an utterly pointless act, at the end of a pointless action movie. Which is probably no great shame, since he was all along, just a junkie with a blunderbuss.
CJ Moseley
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