Looper (2012)

It would be so easy to focus solely on the time travel aspect of this movie. Granted, time travel is integral to the movie so that might not be amiss, but the conversation would invariably be how they screwed up. You know, because I know how it works. It's all those years I put in with the Doctor, don't you know.
I was really digging on the second half of the movie and the whole nod to Akira. Pierce Gagnon, who plays Cid, is one intense little actor. I hope he doesn't get offended by my referring to him as little, and send back some kind of future me to talk me out of posting this, or you know, just blowing my fucking head off. Of course not, that would be silly. I am clearly mistaking the actor for the character. But his eyes were so intense. Pierce, I mean little in the totally most respectful way.
It's hard to watch a time travel movie that also involves killers and not think of the Terminator and it's sequels. Other than one of the gat men having played a terminator in the Sarah Conner Chronicles, there's not a lot of similarity. In fact I wish there was, not that I think Looper was lacking, but that they could have done more with the Terminator films and television series dealing with the paradox of time travel. Or do they...I think Looper and Terminator take a different approach to what time travel does to the space-time continuum. Looper goes for a direct causality in a closed universe, while the Terminator goes the less direct approach and exists in a multiverse. What do I mean? In Looper if someone kills the younger self, the older self is gone because they could not logically exist, but in the Terminator, when parents are killed after the person exists, they are just forgotten by everyone else, they do not just disappear; the out-of-time person has side-stepped into an alternate universe.
Of course Looper violates it's own rules, in a pretty big way. You can't set up a mechanic that is shown to be universal and then not follow it through because you want the happy endind. Well, I guess you can because they did that in this flick, but you shouldn't. It's terribly inelegant and a bit embarrassing I imagine. And I'm not even talking about paradoxes here. I'm just talking about wrapping up the movie without following through on the consequences of removing one piece of the puzzle.
I still really like this movie, though. It took a while to get used to JGL with that fake nose bridge. It looked good and all, but I just keep watching him and thinking, "that's not what he looks like". Once I got passed that, the film was great.

Looper on IMDb