9 Movie Plot Holes Confirmed By The Creators

4. The Illogical Time Travel Mechanics - Looper

The Plot Hole

In fairness, the vast majority of time travel movies suffer with logical issues if you think about them hard enough, and Rian Johnson's (mostly brilliant) sci-fi thriller tries to hand-wave the perceived plot holes by basically telling the audience not to over-think things and just enjoy the ride.

But of course, over-thinking is what the Internet and sci-fi fans do best, so there are a few moments throughout the movie which stick out as just a tad too liberal with the laws of cause and effect.

The body of Seth (Paul Dano) being mutilated in the past and continually re-configured in the present is one such issue, but surely the most egregious plot hole concerns the marital status of Old Joe (Bruce Willis).

After meeting with Young Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) in a diner, Old Joe notices a scar on his arm spelling out the name "Beatrix", a waitress who works in the diner. Young Joe carved the name into his own arm to prove the causality to his older version, despite the ramifications this would have for Joe's future life.

For starters, wouldn't Joe's eventual wife see the name Beatrix scrawled into his arm and maybe think twice about getting into a relationship with this man? That's what we call a red flag, folks.

The Confirmation

In an interview about the movie, Johnson was asked about the tricky nature of constructing a time travel narrative and gave a fairly diplomatic response, conceding the importance of tight character logic over pure A-to-Z storytelling coherence. He said:

"If you think about the classic photo thing in Back to the Future, it really makes no sense at all. If you are changing the timeline and your brother wasn't going to be born, it's not like he wouldn't start disappearing limb from limb from the photo, suddenly another reality would exist where that photo never would have been taken and the piece of paper would vanish. But that doesn't bug me in the slightest, because when you're watching it, you understand what's going on, and it makes sense to you. Even if thinking about it, it seems not logical, makes sense on a storytelling level. And that at the end of the day is what matters."

He's clearly talking about his own movie as much as he is Back to the Future, and it's honestly a pretty solid defence.