Looper - time for another Bruce Willis and a Little Kid movie.

Going into any time travel movie, you should be prepared for the fact that there will be many time paradoxes, and you just hope that they are small enough to accept. That is not the case with this movie. Like you, I wanted to like it. I like many of the actors in the movie.

Spoiler for explaining/complaining about a paradox that destroys the movie:

Spoiler:

My main gripe is that they establish early on that when a person travels back in time, they are traveling within the same universe, same timeline, etc. If something happens to your younger self, that change is reflected on your older self, post-traveling-back-in-time. Ok, fair enough, if you get cut, or lose a finger, your older self gets a scar and loses a finger. These things would not fundamentally prevent any of the actions older self had taken since coming back in time. Now, let's say your younger self loses both legs and both arms. Your older self has lost both legs and both arms, twenty minutes after having run away from younger self. Because it is the same universe, same timeline, older self would have arrived in the past without arms or legs, and therefore couldn't have escaped younger self. But younger self only loses the arms and legs because he allowed older self to escape. Paradox.

If the writer decides that everything is one universe, one timeline, no parallel universes or timelines, then everything that occurs must contribute to, or at the very least not make impossible, the outcome. If a person travels backward in time and ends up in a time concurrent with himself, any actions that older self takes that affect younger self must contribute to younger self being put on the necessary path that results in him traveling back in time. In this movie, the writer decides that it is one universe, one timeline, and then ignores the logical rules.

It is like the story was started as a thought exercise, where the writer came up with an idea, put it to paper, and before he was able to re-read it and see all of the places where he went wrong (and attempt to correct those mistakes), it was filmed.

Jam it back in, in the dark.