Looper is great in many ways, but very unbelievable in its action sequences. Bruce Willis as old Joe turns into "The Terminator" at some point and there are various idiotic schemes on the "bad guy's" behalf of convoluting the task of murder which is illegal anyway. But that is not how I like to criticize movies. I don't like to jump into the nit picky technical band wagon of criticizing films. As that is what happened to films like Prometheus, where everybody decided to play the logical card on a movie about aliens, futuristic space travel and the science fictional creation of man (REALLY!? We are going to get super technical on this one?). Point being, I like fantasy and science fiction because we could really just let our imagination carry us. I really don't see the point in falsifying futuristic abortion or surgical procedures of space ship doctors of the future. It's like as if you only suspend your disbelief of space-traveling through galaxies but then everything else from that point is applied to our real world. In other words, it's a bit of injustice to something that isn't at all real in the first place. It's called science FICTION for a reason. That is why I actually enjoyed Looper and Timecrimes. The two films let me explore the "what if" notion of time travel. Conclusively, I ask myself "do they make me believe that time traveling to the past can some day be real?" and my answer is absolutely not. On the contrary, they make me realize why time travel is most probably impossible.
Timecrimes is the easier film to dissect in its time travel causality paradox. The protagonist is a middle aged man named Hector who is provoked to accidentally run into a time machine by the actions of his future self. If there was no "original" way Hector went into the time machine then how is it possible that his future self went into the time machine? This goes into a dimensional idea, that there are multiple selves and multiple worlds. But as for the linear time travel logic it doesn't add up. That is if you respect the actual concept of time. You have to get into the time machine first before your future self can affect what you do in the past, right? I mean, your future self would never go back in time if it wasn't for their future self provoking them. That all together does not make any logical sense. For example, it would only make sense that you found the time machine first because you were provoked by someone else, not your actual future self. There wouldn't be a discovery of the time machine in the first place, so there would be no future self. It sounds like a headache, I know.
The Timecrimes loop could only be justified if the writers have already perceived that time is not linear but rather space that infinite selves can move through. Take for example the space between rooms; when somebody is time traveling they are breaking into a room in which they do not belong and either try to cause havoc in that room or fix things. Usually the protagonist tries to fix things in time-travel movies.
Now let's dissect Looper, a much more grand film yet still drastically more flawed. In this film there are more unexplained things and plot holes than you can count, but I can care less about those details to be honest. The main focus is the concept. Bruce Willis plays old Joe who comes back in time to prevent his wife from being murdered by the goons of the rainmaker. The rainmaker is a telekinetic menace who is closing all the loops because he blames his mom's death on the loopers. Loopers are guys who kill people from the future sent by the mob of the future and eventually kill themselves to retire for thirty years. That brings us to the film's present time young-Joe played by Joseph Gorden-Levitt. Young Joe fails to kill a bulletproofed old Joe who manages to escape and hunt down three leads that might be the rainmaker as a child. For some reason during the escape of old Joe (Willis) the young Joe finds the "nearest" lead to be the rainmaker. Old Joe inexplicably runs off to "farther" distances to murder two children, one of them being his x-lover's child. This is where the action first starts losing its consistency in my opinion. We learn early that young Joe creates new memories with everything that he does differently from old Joe's life. The old Joe says it's painful, therefore it's conveniently selective to give enough time for the writers to develop the rainmaker child and his mother played by Emily Blunt. To jump forward old Joe finds them and accidentally kills the mother of the rainmaker. In this instant young Joe foresees the eternal loop as the rainmaker uses his power to close down all loops out of hate because they killed his mom. Young Joe also foresees himself infinitely looping to the past to prevent his own wife's death. So then, young Joe decides the only solution is to kill himself. Therefore the rainmaker and his mom live happily ever after and the loops are no longer shut down. Now once again there is the same causality problem as in Timecrimes. If young Joe (Levitt) kills himself as a young man then that would mean that time would actually erase everything that old Joe did. The rainmaker and his mother would not be united in the field in the first place. They would be back to square one where young Joe first meets them except that they didn't meet him because his purpose being there was provoked by his future self, which now would have never happened. Once again the writers understand time as a space to move around in, instead of the actual linear timeline we follow. This goes to show that time travel into the past itself is practically a looney impossible idea. Especially the notion that when you do go back in time you will see your past self there. After all we're going back in time, not making clones of ourselves right?
In Hot Tube Time Machine it is a different more simple approach. When you go back in time you are only your young self again, meaning only one. In this case however you have the knowledge of your future and can change it. This would make more logical sense if it wasn't for the ending. So in the end they go "back to the future" as one guy stays behind in the past to change the future for the better. If everybody else left wouldn't they be gone through that whole gap, therefore have no future? Once again the writers confuse time with space dimension (to move form room to room). To make time-travel to the past even logically comprehensible, which it isn't; I would suggest that once you go back you only really erase time. Therefore future time travel is only erasing your existence from the point you went forward. Traveling to the past means you already erased everything that happened up until the point of time in which you arrive.
In the end of both Timecrimes and Looper, the loop was closed and fixed with the idea that sacrificing a life or human body is the solution. It's like as if you go into a room and kill the problematic person, leave the room; problem solved. In Timecrimes the protagonist saves his wife from being killed by sacrificing the life of another who looks like his wife. Therefore the third Hector fools the two other Hectors who presumably will be stuck in one eternal loop? Only the third Hector moves on? This is all left to assumption and interpretation, but once again it goes against the logic of a linear timeline and rather treats it as a dimensional hacking of multiple selves....... or something of that sort. In the end of Looper he sacrifices his own life to save millions and presumably the loop of Joe is closed forever? But then if he killed himself at that age wouldn't everything old Joe did be completely erased including his actual time travel to the past which means he wouldn't kill himself as a young man in the first place? Where does his actual body go? Does his past existence disappear from time all together? Once again time is treated as space we can move through in a room. Materialistically or I would rather say tangibly time does not actually exist. Not in the sense that matter does. Time is not the decaying of the body either, even though that is one of the common ways in which we measure it. It is not air nor water nor is it matter. One of the ways time exists or is actually measured is through speed. As Stephen Hawkings points out time travel into the future is really only possible with tremendous speed. It would also take mass amounts of improbable earth orbiting construction to reach the speeds to reach a leap into the future. With that almost impossible task, time traveling to the past is even more improbable. So there is no use in logically thinking about time traveling to the past for it is a circular problem that will inevitably have a paradox. For that reason, time traveling movies should be looked at as a fantastic voyage of the imagination. Time traveling into our pasts is like opening up our guilty pleasure of encountering moments we wish we can change, that is without disrupting the universal laws of cause and effect. It is like a private wish for our psyche. To change those things that we wish we had never done or to see an alternate life you might have lived instead. So for that reason time traveling into the past is a great fantasy we can all sit back and enjoy. There is no use for my analogies of the paradoxes. The paradoxes will always be there once we travel to the past, since the concept is illogical from the very start.
