Looper, or "Why Time Travel Breaks Stories"

<Spoiler alert>

<Duh>

Don't look directly at his forehead.

Looper is a movie set in the future, where a hired killer named Joe, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, works for an organized crime syndicate responsible for taking out people from the future. See, in the future, it's very hard to dispose of a body. So future crime syndicates use time travel to send people back to the past to be executed. The people who perform the executions, like Joe, are called "loopers."

This all goes to hell when Joe is ordered to kill his future self, played by Bruce Willis.

Why didn't Willis get prosthetics to look like Gordon-Levitt?

(For the remainder of this review, I will refer to Joe from the future at "Old Joe" and Joe from the present as "Joe." Like I said, time travel makes things difficult.)

Old Joe avoids death and goes on a manhunt for a person called "The Rainmaker." Old Joe says that this man runs all organized crime single-handed and is the source of the future's suffering. According to Old Joe, only a few things are known about The Rainmaker:

1) He saw his mom get shot.
2) He has had reconstructive surgery.
3) He's an unholy terror, capable of killing entire complexes full of baddies by himself.

Who IS that mysterious man?

While Old Joe is on his hunt, Joe finds a farm with a single mother on it named Sarah. Sarah's son, Cid, is an extremely powerful telekinetic with anger issues. Sarah believes that if she can teach Sid to love then he won't grow up to hurt people. Old Joe finds the farm and it is revealed that, in the future, Sid becomes The Rainmaker.

All four of them are drawn into a final, deadly showdown and Joe watches the scene unfold. Joe realizes that if Old Joe shoots at Cid, Sarah will jump in the way, killing her, and leaving the bullet only to graze Cid's cheek as he gets away. This is the event that will create The Rainmaker, and all the pain he will bring. The only way to stop that process is to stop his future self once and for all. Joe turns his shotgun on himself, fires, and dies. Old Joe vanishes from existence. Sarah and Cid are left alive and with a lot of cash, signifying, hopefully, that The Rainmaker will never come to be.

That might seem all well and good, but...

There's a theme in this movie about missing a mother figure. Joe misses his mother and turns to a life of crime. Another looper, Seth, missing his mother, is duped into not killing his future self and ends up getting tortured for that mistake. This theme illustrates how much influence a mother has on the development of a child - in particular her son. It is my theory (well-supported, but a theory nonetheless,) that this theme intended to include Cid as well, suggesting that, without Sarah's presence, he'd become evil. With her presence, however, he might be good. This is also supported by Sarah's own dialogue in the film.

Here's the sticky part: Old Joe was tormented in the future by The Rainmaker, so he comes back into the past to kill Cid. It is this attempt on Sid's life that robs Cid of Sarah, and turns Cid into The Rainmaker. Then The Rainmaker torments Old Joe in the future, and so on, and so forth.

So these two support each other's existence across the timelines. Their lives make a sort of loop. Hence the movie's title.

Here's why that's bullshit: who came first - Cid or Old Joe?

Think about it: The Rainmaker needs to exist for Old Joe to have a reason to go back into the past. But without Old Joe existing in the first place, The Rainmaker (presumably) would never come into being. This is a Chicken-Or-The-Egg kind of question, and the answer could completely dismantle the premise of the story.

There are two logical explanations I can come up with that would explain the first instance of the Rainmaker and the subsequent loop without having to bring in any theoretical science, fuzzy mechanisms, or string theory.

1) Both The Rainmaker and Joe were created at the same time by some intervention of fate.

If this is the case, however, then it takes away from the agency either character has for controlling their destiny or altering time. If both The Rainmaker and Old Joe can be thrown into existence by some cosmic coincidence, how can we be sure that Joe's heroic act at the end of the movie really did anything? If fate could make it not so, then his suicide is pointless.

2) The Rainmaker came into being a different way the first time.

"We are Legion, for we are many!"

It is possible that Cid became The Rainmaker by some means other than Old Joe's assassination attempt. Perhaps a vagrant wandered onto Sarah's farm, killed her, orphaned Cid, and he grew up to be The Rainmaker that way. This is entirely plausible. Then The Rainmaker would go on to create Old Joe's timeline, and Old Joe would then be the cause of Sid's transformation in the remaining timelines. However, if this was the case, we end up with the same problem as before; if Cid can become The Rainmaker without Old Joe, then Joe's sacrifice is pointless. Sure, he gets Old Joe out of the equation, but if that vagrant could still show up and kill Sarah, then nothing is really resolved at the end of the film. The whole cycle could happen again.

The first time I watched Looper, I felt like something was off. I liked the story (even if the middle felt slow,) loved the premise, and, other than Joseph Gordon-Levitt's make-up, I thought the film was put together really well. But the more I dwelled on it and mulled over the sequence of events, the more I realized that this Old Joe - Rainmaker feedback loop was flawed. It was only after really digging into it that I realized it wasn't just flawed. It was total bullshit.

(If you can think of something I'm missing, please feel free to leave a comment and tell me.)