Time travel movies are notoriously hard
to write. Sure, it's possible to just write the story so that you can
go back in time to make everything right, like in Superman.
However, this technique is
considered cheap and is generally derided by fans and critics. The
other problem with time travel stories is dealing with the issues and
paradoxes backwards time travel causes. There's the issue of deciding
whether what happened in the past happened and cannot be changed, or
if it's possible to change the past. If the past can't be changed,
then what's the point of time travel, and if it can be changed, the
writers have to be careful in preventing paradoxes. Looper
cleverly writes it's way out of
all of these problems. It doesn't get into the details of how time
travel works, and while it appears that the past can be changed,
because the mechanism of time travel is unclear paradoxes don't
occur. In the end, writer and director Rian Johnson breaks the rules
of time travel movies whenever he wants and follows them whenever the
story needs them. It makes for a very clever time travel movie that
puts the story before anything else.
