With Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis, Emily Blunt, Paul Dano. In Looper, how did things change the first time? Looper embraces the paradox that’s required for the two-Joes story to even happen, knotting improbability, vengeance and the notion of choice into a taut, sleek, imperfect but intelligent action movie. They are classified into two categories: Consistency Paradoxes and Closed Causal Loop Paradoxes. The Horned Man is a version of It exists when a time traveler is caught in a loop of events that "predestines" or "predates" them traveling back in time. “Looper” adds a new wrinkle to the paradox situation. So here’s the deal. Looper is a Science Fiction film directed by Rian Johnson, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a man named Joseph Simmons, and Bruce Willis plays a future version of Joe.. When young Seth lets his loop run, he is captured and surgically torn apart piece by piece, causing the older Seth to lose the same body parts at the same time. Making statements based on opinion; back them up with references or personal experience. site design / logo © 2021 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under cc by-sa. Looper - Why not send victims someplace to get cremated? If current Seth loses all his body parts, then Old Seth could have never gotten into a car and started driving in the first place, his entire future would have been undone. Vote for Stack Overflow in this year’s Webby Awards! In 2009 Seth Lloyd, a theorist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, proposed an alternative, less radical model of CTCs that resolves the grandfather paradox using … I’m not going to go into every single other paradox because the entire movie is full of them, but here’s something to consider. Here the future is already predetermined, and any actions taken by an individual to go into the past, in order to affect the future, are already taken into account. A predestination paradox (also called causal loop, causality loop, and (less frequently) closed loop or closed time loop) is a paradox of time travel that is often used as a convention in science fiction. Or, if you're like us, you wrote down a list of sins you found in the film. First, we will start with asking – what exactly is a paradox? Looper refuses to make any explanation because nothing can explain the events that occur in the movie other than movie magic. Why didn't they just kill the young looper? … The Looper cast includes Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Bruce Willis and Emily Blunt in the lead roles. In Looper, it is established that permanent physical harm to a young looper will instantaneously affect the old version of the same looper. Change ), You are commenting using your Twitter account. But we see in the movie how Future B has their past rewritten in real-time as the Present A changes things, not just limbs and scars but memories as well. The most chilling scene in the whole film is where Joe’s friend Seth (Paul Dano) fails to close his loop, and his future self (Frank Brennan) escapes. I just think it would be interesting to see how the movie would have panned out if it chose to stick to one type of time travel story line instead of the mishmash that we were presented with. @Boris_yo yeah, that's what you'd expect. ( Log Out /  I assume Abe and his gang know about this. The Romulans came to the past to get revenge on Spock for the destruction of their planet. Is the Arena default deck "Line of Fire" bad or is it just me? That's all. And if Old Seth’s entire future is undone, then why not just kill current Seth, either way you achieve the same result. They destroy Spock’s home world and kill Kirk’s father. To subscribe to this RSS feed, copy and paste this URL into your RSS reader. Mutilated!Seth gets killed by a new young!Seth who grows up and gets sent back only to escape, closing the loop. Conclusions. But this just isn't that kind of universe. ***SPOILER “The Looper Paradox”. It's more on the Back to the Future end of the time travel movie spectrum rather than the Primer end :). When Seth gets tortured, his future self feels in happening because the Seth's in A and B both had it happen to them. Looper. Looper, like Doctor who, plays with all three of these storylines. We know the above will happen, since something similar happens later in the movie. We’ve already established that changing your body in the present will change your body in the future, so why did Joe have to kill himself? Directed by Rian Johnson. It'd be too cataclysmic a change for the future. Well folks, I’m finally back. How do runes work? Change ). Time travel is outlawed, so only outlaws have time travel. Looper is directed by Rian Johnson. Then Old Seth slowly starts losing body parts while driving, as the gang is cutting up current Seth’s body, and here is the first unexplainable paradox. In an interview, Rian Johnson , director of Looper, has indicated that it was part of an early creative decision to take a linear approach to time, instead of one where there is a constant switch to alternate timelines. ( Log Out /  Can top level domains disappear if countries cease to exist / malfunction? In 2074, when the mob wants to get rid of someone, the target is sent into the past, where a hired gun awaits - someone like Joe - who one day learns the mob wants to 'close the loop' by … If there is only one timeline then the limbs should have all come off right away on the Older Seth. Here, going back into the past to change events will create a new time stream, a parallel universe to the one the time traveler belongs to. But that’s not what I want to talk about, what I want to talk about is the very thing that Willis refused to let us talk about, because talking about it kind of destroys the plot’s logic for the entire movie. The present-day mob captures young Seth and carves a message into his arm to get to a certain address in 15 minutes, which his future self sees as history has been changed. A time travel paradox is a logical contradiction or apparent contradiction which is associated with time travel generally. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top, Science Fiction & Fantasy Stack Exchange works best with JavaScript enabled, Start here for a quick overview of the site, Detailed answers to any questions you might have, Discuss the workings and policies of this site, Learn more about Stack Overflow the company, Learn more about hiring developers or posting ads with us, Oh, I missed the fact Abe's gang didn't kill. * My reading of Looper is this: it is a movie in which time travel is bad. JGL and Willis give great performances, as is expected of them and the story, for what it is, is fine for entertainment purposes. Why is it, then, that in Seth's case: when the killers capture young Seth, they torture and mutilate him in order to force old Seth to come to them, then end shooting him up? Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. ( Log Out /  These events change the story for the current universe, but future Spock still remembers the events from his own universe as they should be and doesn’t disappear from the current universe when the time stream changes enough that the events that happened to him could no longer have possibly happened to have allowed him to remain in the current universe. Presumably, carving people up is one of the things time travel in Looper allows without too much fuss. Simply put: it's impossible for these two Joe's to both exist and have a connection whereby Young Joe can leave scar messages in Old Joe's skin, or Old Joe is clouded with Young Joe's memories. Generate combinations of a given sequence without recursion, Looking for the source code of a sophisticated Pascal pretty-printing program, Fallacy by Sherlock Holmes 'Eliminate the impossible, and what remains must be the truth'. Seth - when Young Seth fails to kill his older self they start chopping limbs off of the young Seth. He has to be at a specified place, at a specified time, and instantly shoot the thing that appears in front of him. Like the Seths, the paradoxal nature of Looper' s time travel story is seen in the two Joes. Could black holes made of matter and antimatter explode if they were to collide? Asking for help, clarification, or responding to other answers. Young Joe believes that he needs to kill himself to stop Old Joe from coming back in time to kill the young Cid. While the plot is pretty interesting, the time-travel does create unescapable paradoxes which are hard to ignore. Looper is a 2012 American science fiction action-thriller film written and directed by Rian Johnson, and produced by Ram Bergman and James D. Stern.It stars Bruce Willis, Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt.It revolves around "present-day" contract killers called "loopers" hired by criminal syndicates from the future to terminate victims whom they send back through time. There are three basic types of time travel stories, as you can see in the image above. Why couldn’t current Joe make the conscious decision to never leave the farm, or to vow never to try to get revenge on the Rainmaker by going into the past and killing the Rainmaker’s younger self? It's creating problems with a new lock. The third type of story is probably the easiest to work with for purposes of being able to both change the future and not create paradoxes. Why windows executables show incorrect compiler timestamps? The grandfather paradox is a paradox of time travel in which inconsistencies emerge through changing the past. Thus: Any permanent physical change that happens to the past version will instantly affect the future version in the same time. Presumably with Joe it gets a lot more complicated, or possibly he just destroyed the universe in a massive paradox. I’m talking about the ridiculous use of time travel in this story. Stack Exchange network consists of 176 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. Abe says to Joe when he's convincing him to give up young Seth that they won't kill young Seth because it would affect the future too much by not having old Seth around. Here we have the story playing with Time Travel storylines 2 and 3; changing the present affects one’s own future, but not enough to change the actions that one takes. ), or maybe they don't care what young Seth would go on to do as long as old Seth was around when they sent him back in time. Why does a Looper have to kill his older self? We’ve been fascinated with it for so long — hell, I published a story that discusses it — but we do it so poorly. The answer is of course that if Joe chose to never leave the farm or to never seek revenge, then the movie never happens. The answer given is good, but to add (and likely make things more confusing), wouldn't scarring up and removing young Seth's limbs have the potential to greatly affect the future as well? Because there wouldn't be an old Seth to send back, creating a paradox. The crux of the film is a predestination paradox, that is, an uncaused cause, an event which causes itself and therefore does not happen unless it happens. Edit: I just checked and their exact words were: Abe: Not if we can help it. The Back To The Future trilogy and most of the time travel genre do not really acknowledge the paradox, because it is incredibly confusing and doesn’t make for much of a story. Then Old Seth slowly starts losing body parts while driving, as the gang is cutting up current Seth’s body, and here is the first unexplainable paradox. Why is Mao's face on the money in Looper? rev 2021.5.3.39192. I guess that must mean there is no such thing as Future B, he's actually Future A all along? Old Joe would have dropped his gun instantly, giving current Joe enough time to get close enough to shoot Old Joe, or at least enough time to give the Rainmaker and his mom enough time to get away. When you really think about it, Looper was a terrible film that made absolutely no sense. Exciting Mario Kart Grand Prix - Minimize the point difference! The Doctor at least tries to explain away any possible paradoxes by telling us that time travel is “a big ball of wibbly wobbly, timey wimey…stuff,” and to an extent the Doctor Who universe does limit its paradoxes by explaining that some points in time are fixed and some aren’t. Find knowledge faster: New Articles features, May 2021 Topic Challenge: Margaret St. Clair, Testing three-vote close and reopen on 12 network sites, Latest Blog Post: Favorite Question and Answers from First Quarter 2021. You either loved it or hated it. Is the torture simply sadism? Looper in general had a very lax view of time travel rules in favor of characterization and dialogue. SQL Server Logon Trigger Implications - are there any side effects possible in my scenario? When Seth fails to close his loop and is on the run, Abe tells the gat men it would be preferable not to kill Seth because all sorts of bad (time travel paradox related) things could happen. Can a Rune Knight forge them? I’m not the first person to write about the problems with Looper, the Internet is littered with articles outlining why the… Wouldn't simply killing young Seth get rid of both Seths? It likes to leave things where they are and change as little as possible, and people retain their memory of the paradox (although, as Future Joe explains, it's not pleasant to have memories of conflicting events in your head). The story is the thing, but you also have to let go of any need to neatly line up the narrative pieces; trust the tale. Old Joe disappears, and Cid's future is better for it. What's the point in covering the viewfinder? So somehow Old Seth’s physical body is affected by changes to his own past, but he still somehow finds himself getting into a car, with no arms or legs, and successfully driving for a length of time before crashing in front of the address that he intended to reach. What remains of the killing-your-earlier-self paradox in general relativistic time travel … Alternatives to the law of the excluded middle. It was a confusing story about time travel and telekinesis set in the future that is strangely reminiscent of the past. And if Joe, who is definitely not the sharpest tool in the shed, can figure it out, surely Abe must also know it? Basically, if you go back in time to fix a problem, and the problem disappears in the future, then your future self no longer needs a reason to go back in time to fix the problem, meaning your future self doesn’t ever go back in time to fix the problem, which means the problem happens, which means your future self goes back in time now to fix the problem, which means… well you get it, there’s an infinite loop here. First, there’s the fixed timeline, which Doctor Who fans should be quite familiar with by now. First let’s look at how Looper’s dealt with the first escapee, Old Seth. Is there really an infinite loop in Looper? By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy. We saw this in the last Star Trek movie. The name comes from the paradox's description: a person travels to the past and kills their own grandfather before the conception of their father or mother, which prevents the time traveller's existence. This is all basically why Looper gives us that awesome little diner scene. Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in: You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. For example, a looper can send a message to his older self by permanently carving it in his arm. A Consistency Paradox is also more well-known as a Grandfather Paradox and other variants such as the Hitler Paradox. Manner as … does Joe ’ s look at how Looper ’ s dealt with the time! Possible outcome of the things time travel in which inconsistencies emerge through changing past. 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