Episode 1486: Looper

Went to see Looper with Natalie. Don't see why some people have found it confusing. Admittedly, I did leave the cinema thinking that for a time travel film, it actually took care of its temporal paradoxes quite well. Then I thought about it some more, and realised that the film doesn't seem to obey the Novikov self-consistency principle, which is one of the ways in which such paradoxes can be explained away. Long story short, Young Joe shooting himself would render unexplained why there was ever an Old Joe coming back from the future to try and alter the past in the first place. Then I found this article on The Huffington Post, which not only clarified how the various timelines work in the film, but in the comments thread, someone put forward an interesting suggestion. Although an optimistic interpretation of the ending indicates that Young Joe has succeeded in altering Cid's future, preventing him from becoming the Rainmaker, there's no actual evidence provided within the film for this. Furthermore, if Young Joe foresees how Old Joe killing Sara would drive Cid to grow up into the Rainmaker, i.e. Old Joe is caught up in a self-fulfilling prophecy, this doesn't explain how the Rainmaker came to exist in the original timeline. So there could be some other event that steers Cid onto that path, and in order to obey the Novikov self-consistency principle, it's really Cid that's closing his loop, so to speak, by becoming the Rainmaker who starts sending all the loopers back for execution, due to what he witnessed at the ending of the film. Pretty interesting theory, I think? Anyway, plenty of food for thought, like with all good science fiction films (and science fiction in general).