10 Movies That Couldn't Get Time Travel Right

5. Looper

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G90QrEKh8l8 Looper gets a lot of flak for its time travel plot holes, but on the whole I thought it was a finely-assembled sci-fi and by and large the best film I saw last year. It engages with time travel in a novel way, which sees assassin Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) tasked with tracking down his older self (Bruce Willis) and stopping him killing a young innocent he believes will save his dead wife. Believe me, it gets trickier. Half-way through the film, Young Joe carves the name of his favourite waitress, "Beatrix", into his arm, as he knows this will immediately tell Old Joe that he is at the diner. The two meet, and naturally the scar has appeared on Old Joe's arm as well. The problem is that this changes time; Joe's arm would be tainted with that scar for the rest of his life, so when Joe later goes to China and settles down, wouldn't his wife be pretty freaking weirded out by him having another woman's name scarred on his arm? I'm guessing she wouldn't be that interested in hanging out with someone who does that, let alone marrying them. Thus, Old Joe wouldn't have anyone to fight for in the end. Of course, the film lampshades this quite well by suggesting that time is an amorphous concept that gets cloudier and less cloudy the more and less likely events become, but still, it would've been hilarious to see Joe trying to court his future wife and her subsequent disgust at his creepy "tattoo".
 
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Frequently sleep-deprived film addict and video game obsessive who spends more time than is healthy in darkened London screening rooms. Follow his twitter on @ShaunMunroFilm or e-mail him at shaneo632 [at] gmail.com.