When a filmmaker ventures down the wormhole of time
travel as a narrative device, he’s setting his film up to be prodded and picked
apart in the minutest detail to discover all the flaws and inconsistencies. The
best time travel movies tend to be the ones that have some intelligence about
the process and implications of traveling to the past, but mostly they succeed
when the time travel becomes secondary to other elements in the film.
Take a film like Back
to the Future, for example. Yes, without the time travel there is no story,
but the breakneck pace, the good writing, the funny jokes all take precedence
over the fact of Marty going 30 years into the past. In the case of Rian
Johnson’s Looper, I could talk about
a paradox that unravels the entire story if we follow logical consistency, but
we’re dealing with a science fiction action film that relies on something that
doesn’t exist and is only theoretically possible in terms of traveling forward
in time. In Johnson’s film, the only time travel happens backward.
