Get your chalk boards ready, it looks like we have another wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey problem on our hands. Looper is a film due to be released 28th September (IMDB) in which time travel has been invented and the mob send those they want dead back into the past, to be disposed of. Our protagonist is the one who does the killing and it’s all hunky dory until one day he finds that the person he has to kill is himself.
I am a bit of an overthinker however and before we all go away and talk about how awesome it is (and it is awesome) let us ponder several things:
- Why would the mob do this? Surely it’s a really inefficient way of killing people. Yeah, their bodies are gone, but I think the mob is pretty good at disposing bodies
- Are there not better ways the mob could use time travel? As a physicist it’s pretty demoralising that criminal masterminds are only going to use it as a bad way of killing people
- Why on earth would you ever kill yourself? That has got to always be a bad idea. Even the most short-sighted criminal lowlife would realise that that would be him in 30 years time
- Do the loopers not worry that the mob will try and kill them? (They do happen to know quite a lot after all)
- How will this film deal with all the general paradoxy time problems/butterfly effects?
- What have they done to Gorden-Levitt’s face? They seem to have Bruce Willis-afied him.
So come at me. Let’s have a ridiculous ill informed, over-theorised discussion of the sort that our friends decry (usually with a silly line like “yeah, but people can’t travel in time anyway”). After all, if any of this does happen, this ought to be good preparation.
Other than the telekinetic rubbish. I can’t help with that. Watch Star Wars.
1) In the future it is virtually impossible to dispose of a body due to “tagging techniques”. So they have to send them back to be disposed of. Since they are already sending them back, they send them back hog tied, gagged, and with a bag over their head for the Looper to kill as well as dispose of the body. That way the mob has no ties to the actual crime
2)There are far better ways. But it’s illegal when it’s invented and the mob were never fans of morals or following the law.
3)Part of a loopers job is that one day they may have to “close their loop” if the mob of the future needs to sever all ties. When they do, they get a ton of gold (as oppose to the 4 bars of silver for a regular kill) and get to live the next thirty years filthy rich. These are arrogant low life guys in their twenties. The script says “This job doesn’t tend to attract the most forward thinking people”.
4) They don’t really worry about it until it’s too late.
5) No CGI or motion capture. Just prosthetics and make up.