We start the third week of the fifth edition of "League of Movies" created by @wiseagent. The theme of this week is "Now and Then", we must make a review about movies that are about time travel, there are excellent movies of any genre to participate, that's why this time I invite @amaponian and @jhonatanb, you can check the rules in the following link League of Movies
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"Violence generates violence..."
Time travel is something that has always fascinated me, as a child I think the first movies I saw about this genre were "The Terminator" (1984) and "Back to The Future" (1985), one full of action/terror and another fun, with adventures and even music, both movies with excellent characters, good stories and most importantly, rules to follow, This must be the first thing I learned from this type of film, I know that there will be rules that may or may not be similar between stories or there will be new ones that are convenient according to the film we are watching, but there is always an exception where even though "time travel" is involved in the main story, sometimes it seems not to be the important thing.
"Looper" is an excellent film, it must be one of the many films about time travel that I have seen that does not give much importance to that topic, its story is based mainly on the violent life of "Joe", a hitman who works for a criminal organization which is directed from the future where time travel exists, These killers are called "Looper" and are responsible for disappearing victims of the mafia, because in the future it will be difficult to disappear corpses, this contract will remain until the loop is closed and that's when the Looper must kill his old version, that is the first explanation that gives us this story about time travel that later took the key importance to tell the story of its main character.
If there was something that made me watch this movie besides the action and time travel, that was the decision to have two versions of a character, one older and one very young, that's why it was necessary to have two actors and not one where I should let the CGI do all the work, to have two famous actors like Bruce Willis and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, to play two versions of a character was a very good decision, but the use of makeup by the artist Kazuhiro Tsuji, was something that I liked very much because both his work and the one that Gordon-Levitt does with his performance, helps so that there is no difference between him and Willis, Both actors make a different representation of a character, not so much with respect to their age which one is 25 years old and the other is 55 years old, the difference between them is in the way they feel at a specific time when they share the same era, one suffers from the pain of loss and from doing what is necessary so that at the right time he does not feel that pain again, the other only wants and dreams of a life after closing his contract, as we can see in a time there is a man with a future and another who does not know what will become of him a few years later, in the end both feel the same but their decisions are different.
Rian Johnson has directed and written an excellent story, I felt from the first moment like a drama with science fiction and action, but there is something that I found great and the sense of humor with which he treats time travel where in a dialogue he invites the viewer to focus not on rules and timelines but on what happens in the now, This is already happening in the middle of the story, but as a narrator it would be useless if there is not a beginning and in it he tells us what is necessary and even shows us the effects that happen if two versions of a single person exist in a timeline, But regardless of what may or may not happen, I think that as a screenwriter, Johnson wants you to mostly focus on the story of a specific character and his decisions that will affect the future of him and others, that happened to me not only the first time I saw it, but the many other times I've seen it and if it weren't for the discussion/task we have this week in "The League" I wouldn't give any importance to something that seemed to be a little cloudy in this story.
In this publication I have repeated several times what for me this story is about and that is how violence can affect the lives of many people and define them, but as the theme of this week is about time travel, it is necessary to expose that part that seems to be treated very lightly in this film, before continuing I want to warn you that you can find SPOILERS of this film, so if you have not seen it I must advise you that you are under your responsibility of what you are going to read. In this story we see two versions of Joe, one young and one adult, but we also see two time lines of this character, both begin from the moment the young Joe must close his contract, in one is closed successfully and in the other not, the line where the contract is closed we see how the life of the young Joe continues, but we see that there is a change that makes the loop where the old Joe is killed by his young version breaks and this makes a series of situations occur, the main one is future Joe returns to the past to change what will happen 30 years from now in the future, in that instant the timeline of the young Joe changes and begins a new one, but what originates all these loops breaks? Is Old Joe the one who creates new time constants? We can think so, because everything indicates that Old Joe is the cause of the creation of The Rainmaker, but I think there is another answer since in this story there is another time traveler and that is "Abe" played by Jeff Daniels, he is the head of organized crime in 2044, he hires the "Loopers" and assigns them their jobs, It is certain that he knows about the future of each one of his employees and that can be verified when he advises young Joe to go to China instead of France, I believe that from that advice it is the first step for the creation of the timeline that we see in the film, if Joe did not go to China he does not obtain what he has always wanted and that is to be loved, by not having that and losing it, he does not sacrifice his life by returning in time and trying to change it.
The version interpreted by Willis, not only ends the loop that his young version lives, it creates a new one to him, for the other assassins that will have to abruptly close their contracts, this I had never thought about the first time I saw this film, so many paradoxes focused on a new time line created or not by a council that could be a mistake of a time traveler and affects what will happen in the future, the thing is that this story does not expose laws in the trips, only shows consequences and Rian Johnson leaves a lot for the viewer to fill what can be considered holes in the plot with many theories that I have found and did not know existed, seeing this film from the point of view of knowing the origin of timelines and discovering or speculating what is the true origin of the "Rainmaker" has given it a better taste than what this film already had, I hope that people who have not seen it can do it, it is a very good film, very good acting, good story, very well directed and well written.
