@ Chris Wellons:

Wow, interesting theory. I didn’t catch the name of the other kid so I never really thought about that.

Also, TIL about SciFi StackExchange. Thanks for the link. :P

I finally got around to watching it so I came back to read your review. You nailed it. They had a really neat idea, but the execution was botched and the story too dumbed-down. I can understand why there aren’t any Looper memes.

The scarring thing bothered me early on. Memories manifest themselves physically in the brain with neuron connections, or whatever, just like scars would on the arm. This means a Looper wouldn’t need to use scars to one-way communicate with themselves, they just need to form a solid memory of what they want to communicate. For example, they could write down their message in large, clear text (visual memory) and read it over and over, perhaps saying it aloud, maybe singing it, memorizing it well enough to recall in 30 years. That memory would “scar” itself into the brain just as a knife-message would on the arm. Really, this would apply to all important events, so that the future version would immediately know about it.

While searching for answers to questions about the movie I came across this interesting theory: Sarah is Joe’s daughter. She was sent back in time to care for the Rainmaker after he killed his real mother. That would explain the otherwise unnecessarily complicated “my sister took care of him” part of the story.

I think my favorite part of the movie was seeing how well Joseph Gordon-Levitt captured Bruce Willis’s mannerisms. Honestly, Willis isn’t really in the movie enough for this to really be needed, but for viewers who are familiar with his acting I think it helps make the connection.

Good review Luke. Not only is it action-packed and tension-ridden, it concludes its metaphysical discussion concerning time travel with a punctuation point that is so strongly defined and yet so elusive in its final meaning that it will send your head spinning for a loop or two (no pun intended).

Actually the movie had several plot devices that it didn’t do a good enough job of disguising or painting over. The blunderbusses(?) come to mind. The reason loopers are given blunderbusses is apparently because it’s hard to miss anything with them. The real reason appears to stem from the final scene of the script having been envisioned well before establishing the setting–if Joe had a regular gun, he could have shot old Joe instead of himself, and you can’t have that.

I agree on the issue of exposition, including the bits that take place in dialogue. If they had simply let viewers figure out what was happening, and not even hint at time travel, we would be speaking about it in the same tones as Primer, and not pinning this entry in the “Worst uses of time travel ever” list.

I found it a pretty enjoyable movie, but knew it wasn’t advised to think too deeply about it.

Yeah, that pretty much sums up my thoughts on it too.