I don't think I like time travel without Michael J. Fox

Here's a spoiler alert for any of you that are going to see Looper. I left confused at the ending, and I blame it on poorly designed time travel tropes.

I'll keep Marty McFly and the Back to the
Future paradoxes over those ones
that drove me insane by watching Looper.

This weekend, I saw the film. It had one of the most horrific scenes in it that left me haunted for a couple of days afterward. Basically, I kept thinking of the horrible implications of torturing a young person and watching those wounds instantly appear on the older (but same person) who existed in the same timeline.

But aside from that, the ending left me really confused. JGL's character commits suicide at the end of the movie to PREVENT his older self from performing an act that sets the future on a course that he does not like. But I don't get how this solves anything? By killing himself, his older self doesn't exist thereby creating the reason for him taking this action in the first place.

Plus, the whole "kill yourself to change time" trope has been done a lot. Dr. Who's "Angels take Manhattan" did the same thing. Star Trek did it in "Yesterday's Enterprise" and in "Year of Hell." It happened in Terminator 2.

So on another level, the trope was incredibly unoriginal.

I don't think I like time travel without Michael J. Fox. At least then it was funny and Michael was charming.

This remake handled time travel really
well, even if it was underwhelming
(and short) as a film.

One show that I think handled time travel really well was the Time Machine. In it, Guy Pierce invents a time machine in order to go back into time to save his beloved wife from an untimely death. Well he does so, but she dies a few minutes later from something else. To understand why, he travels into the future and discovers that in creating a time machine, he created a paradox. The moment that he saved his wife, the motivation for the creation of the time machine evaporated and hence, wouldn't be invented.

Why couldn't Looper embrace this? Why couldn't Looper have seen that JGL needed to stop Bruce Willis in a way that didn't kill himself. And why the hell wouldn't Bruce Willis have JGL's epiphany suddenly pop into his mind so that he would know that what he was about to do would set the future on a course that his younger self did not like?

Anyway, overall I think I liked Joseph Gordon Levitt and that's about all I can say that's positive about this movie. I think before any writer tackles time travel and expects me to swallow it, they need to think really really long on it, or I'm most likely going to be frustrated, confused, and just simply prone to not liking it.

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