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jackBack To The Future is the benchmark for time travel that makes plot-sense but doesn't make physics-sense. Marty goes back in time, accidentally prevents his parents from meeting, then needs to get them together again. When he does, he returns to the future which is better in several other ways due to the changes he made.
From a logical standpoint, this makes no sense. When he alters the past, he should either disappear instantly (in fact, in the past) or not be affected at all, it makes no sense for him to disappear *slowly*. When he jumps back to the future, how come things are MOSTLY the same, to the extent that his parents never say "how come your memories are all different", but some things are different? Where is the Marty from _that_ timeline? Did he go back in time? What timeline did he end up in?
But none of that matters because you know everything you need to know in order for the plot to work. Time travel is difficult, so they don't have time to experiment, they only know what Doc can work out, which is often has big areas of "this is dangerous, don't do it", without needing to go into details of exactly how it's dangerous. The rules are stated up front, and we're not expected to argue with Doc, we should just assume that's a voice-of-the-author. And the film doesn't betray us, it sticks comfortably to the rules stated, and never pokes into the edge cases and inconsistencies.
I think the thing with Looper is that the time travel makes about as much sense as Back to the Future. But it looks worse. BTTF had the sense not to poke the inconsistencies. Looper's whole plot is directly based on exploring the rules, which is superficially clever because, hey, interesting thoughts about time travel. (And many other things about the film are genuinely clever.) But when you actually look closely, they make no sense! Which rather undermines the cleverness -- if your film makes less sense than BTTF, it's rather ruining the "clever" aspect.
I think either sort of story can work well. But if you have a beautiful set-up suggesting that viewers pay close attention to the details of your macguffin, and then your macguffin turns out to be full of holes, they will get an unfortunate backlash at the end of the film, even if your macguffin is better than average, if they expected better. It's probably better on rewatching, when you can enjoy the good stuff, and know which holes not to poke...
From a logical standpoint, this makes no sense. When he alters the past, he should either disappear instantly (in fact, in the past) or not be affected at all, it makes no sense for him to disappear *slowly*. When he jumps back to the future, how come things are MOSTLY the same, to the extent that his parents never say "how come your memories are all different", but some things are different? Where is the Marty from _that_ timeline? Did he go back in time? What timeline did he end up in?
But none of that matters because you know everything you need to know in order for the plot to work. Time travel is difficult, so they don't have time to experiment, they only know what Doc can work out, which is often has big areas of "this is dangerous, don't do it", without needing to go into details of exactly how it's dangerous. The rules are stated up front, and we're not expected to argue with Doc, we should just assume that's a voice-of-the-author. And the film doesn't betray us, it sticks comfortably to the rules stated, and never pokes into the edge cases and inconsistencies.
I think the thing with Looper is that the time travel makes about as much sense as Back to the Future. But it looks worse. BTTF had the sense not to poke the inconsistencies. Looper's whole plot is directly based on exploring the rules, which is superficially clever because, hey, interesting thoughts about time travel. (And many other things about the film are genuinely clever.) But when you actually look closely, they make no sense! Which rather undermines the cleverness -- if your film makes less sense than BTTF, it's rather ruining the "clever" aspect.
I think either sort of story can work well. But if you have a beautiful set-up suggesting that viewers pay close attention to the details of your macguffin, and then your macguffin turns out to be full of holes, they will get an unfortunate backlash at the end of the film, even if your macguffin is better than average, if they expected better. It's probably better on rewatching, when you can enjoy the good stuff, and know which holes not to poke...
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Date: 2013-09-20 05:27 pm (UTC)I'm wondering whether this is a useful place for the pejorative sense of clever. My definition these days of pejorative-sense cleverness is something like, "mental agility, often displayed conspicuously - possibly as pure showing-off, often self-serving, usually to bad effect, often accompanied by crashing stupidity". See the xkcd cartoon about updating an operating system and ending up fending off sharks.