Time to Watch All Of Looper’s Errors In Three Minutes
While I won’t spoil things just to be a jerk about it, be advised you should watch the film before reading the following.
You don’t have to be a movie Nazi to be able to pick apart the errors that are doubtlessly embedded in almost every time travel movie out there, but you do have to be paying attention. And isn’t that what movies are all about? Just paying attention. Wait, fuck that. Movies are generally supposed to make sense while they’re doing their storytelling, but we all know sci-fi takes its fair share of liberties. Well, now that the good-eyed good guys at the CinemaSins are on the job, no movie is safe. Not even a movie that could theoretically come back in time and stop CinemaSins from even putting this video together.
Yes, Rian Johnson’s sci-fi time-crime-traveling thriller Looper is the latest to carry the scars of CinemaSins’ plot-dissecting talons, and boy did they pick some good ones. From easy marks such as the makeup and Bruce Willis’ wig for one scene, to diner posters advertising “Soy Steak,” these 43 entries seem shortsighted when put up against the larger numbers of Avengers and Dark Knight Rises. But that could be a reflection of time travel being more inherently realistic than Mark Ruffalo getting angry. Stay tuned all the way to the end of the video for a nice Pulp Fiction reference.
Of course, many of these are for humorous effect, but there is nothing disingenuous about asking a shit-ton of questions about the surprise cameo by Telekinesis, and the strange bedfellow it made for every other kind of science-trouncing function. Perhaps this could be paired with Mark Lester’s Firestarter.
The final round-up of questions all refer to the film’s climax and ending, which spit in the face of the concept of cause and effect. This usually happens in sci-fi third acts, but this one takes the cake, hinging the entire film’s events on a single action, but then without anything actually changing. Everything that Bruce Willis did probably still happened by the film’s end. And I also can’t for the life of me understand why the wife could be killed in the future, but no one else.
I really liked Looper, and these faults aren’t keeping me from watching it again. But I appreciate CinemaSins for informing the public that this was not, in fact, a documentary, and I can’t wait to see what they blast next.
