ONTD

lol it just missed it on all counts for me. It ended up feeling just trope-based, where the connections were based on how you expect the connections to go, rather than any sort of organic emotive relationship. I mean, I've been exposed to a LOT of time travel shit in my love for sci-fi tv&film, so the end just felt like "okay, sure, but why am I supposed to care?" I think if they had gone deeper into Willis's wife and their relationship, I would have felt like something had been lost, their love/relationship or whatever, but I really just felt like everything that happened was of little consequence. "You created your own dismal future by time travel!" is just... so expected. The most surprising thing to me was the random-ass sex between JGL & the mom, because seriously, how pointless was that.

I spent the whole movie having these interesting plotlines sort of roll out in my head, trying to figure out where the movie would go. And where the movie DID go just wasn't anywhere special for me. I didn't care that JGL died. I didn't care that the kid went darkside in some other universe. I didn't care about Bruce Willis & his wife. I think the thing I cared most about was the brief period of time where I thought that the woman only had one leg.

lol, if it made you cry it obvs got to you, but seriously it felt super empty to me in terms of emotion. I cared way more about kid-who-shot-himself-in-the-foot than any other character.

I WANTED TO LOVE IT. I just didn't end up loving it. So it's definitely okay, not BAD, but it wouldn't make any of my "best" lists, even if it was just of the sci-fi movies of the year.

...well. It might make that list. I currently can't think of any sci-fi movies I saw this year other than Total Recall, which, lmfao, is not going to make a best-of list ever.

it makes sense, I just don't feel the same lol. I never expected them to kill the kid because, frankly, Hollywood almost never lets children die at all. I would have been shocked if the kid died, and I think it would have actually been better as a film for me, particularly if it DIDN'T change anything, the inevitability of the future blah blah blah.

The kid's choice as an issue didn't really come into play for me, because he ALWAYS had choices-- sure, he'd be extra traumatized by his mother dying, but that kid was traumatized as it was. The idea of ~sweet sacrificing mother's love saving the day* is just cliche and overdone. I got over it in Harry Potter, frankly, lol.


*in the sense that her love for him is what makes him not be evil down the road.

see, I didn't see it that way at all-- I saw it as him being assumed to have this life that inclined him toward bad behaviour (see: he'd already killed people by whatever-years-old-he-was in the movie), with Willis's role in his mother's death making him go specifically down the path that led to Loopers getting killed/his wife's death/the movie plot. It would have given him a guarantee to go into/against loopers as he went older. The way they framed it-- the idea that mother would love him as a child and give him a chance to be good-- doesn't say at ALL that he won't grow up to be a terror/mob-boss, especially because loldistopian future, and unless there was something after the credits, we can only ~guess about what the mother was supposed to be able to help him grow into. No matter what the mother raised him to be, he's still going to be this freak telekenetic game changer.

but lol yeah we do seem to agree, and that's why I never said it was bad-- it was fine for what it was, and it worked for you that's great, but it just felt like they took a lot of cheap shortcuts. Like I said somewhere above, the movie itself didn't live up to the creative awesomeness of its concept.