It'll be interesting to see how Abrams tries to fix this

Rian Johnson does his best to head off the complaints of those paying attention. “If we talk about time travel we’re gonna be talking about it all day, making diagrams with straws,” protests one of the characters. And yet this is a time travel movie, one in which the plot revolves around people being physically yanked back in time and trying to change the past. If it were just a story about how we wouldn’t take the advice of our older selves if it were on offer, the plot mechanic could have been something nice and low-budget like mysterious emails from the future. Instead we have Bruce Willis with gold strapped to his back and gunplay galore.

If a director claims they’re making a “serious” time travel movie, rather than some Hollywood nonsense starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, we’d expect them to at least acknowledge, if not grapple with, some of the intricacies science fiction novels (and indeed physicists) have been dealing with for decades. On this front Looper isn’t Primer or Donnie Darko, or even the best time travel movie starring Bruce Willis (that would be Twelve Monkeys). It blithely ignores the Grandfather Paradox, or contingent vs quantum-forking models of time travel, or the Hitler’s Murder paradox. The only way to send a message to your future self seems to be to carve it into your skin, rather than get a discreet tattoo, or just memorise it as done in one movie with a more sophisticated theory of time travel, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. Nobody in Looper seems to have thought of sending time machines and maintenance manuals back in time, which would create the bootstrap paradox we see in the Terminator movies (starring Arnold Schwarzenegger). Even Jeff Daniels’s ability to affect the future with terse hints (“I’m from the future. Go to China.”) is dealt with better in a time-travel episode of My Little Pony. Seriously, it is.

But if Rian Johnson doesn't want to talk about time travel because it gives him a headache and reminds him of dull afternoons doodling in the margins of his math textbook. Here are some plot holes that don’t revolve around mind-bending time paradoxes.

A central plot conceit is that loopers execute themselves. You’re sent a victim, it turns out to be you 30 years older, but hey, old-you comes with a big pile of gold to help make the next 30 years more bearable. Of course, if you recognized your older self it might be hard to pull the trigger (a hesitation required by the plot) of your really, really inaccurate gun (also required by the plot). Telekinesis, however, is completely superfluous to the plot and just an excuse for some cool CGI.

Why do loopers exist? Because it’s impossible to inconspicuously murder people in the future. Forensic science in 2074 is so amazingly advanced that victims are sent back to 2044 to be shot in broad daylight and stuffed in an incinerator (no chance of future cops noticing that, I’m sure!) Meanwhile, in 2074: “So our nanobots and DNA sniffers have traced the kidnapped man all the way to the door of this illegal time machine, and then he just disappears. Oh well, file this one under Unsolved.”

But OK, let’s accept that premise: time machines are used to dispose of bodies. So why send the victims back alive? Or, if creating a corpse would still be too messy, why not at least render them unconscious? A wee knock on the head, if not a lethal injection, and there’s much less chance something might go terribly wrong in the past.

But for some reason victims must be sent back alive and conscious. Why, though, have loopers murder themselves? Isn’t that just asking for trouble? Instead have them execute a retired looper they’ve never met, from far away, preferably someone who doesn’t even speak their language. Much safer.

You know what? You have a time machine. Can you really not think of a better way of disposing of people without leaving a trace? Go send them to play with dinosaurs or watch Krakatoa erupt.

Hold on—why, exactly, are retired loopers executed? It can’t be to keep them quiet—they’re left peacefully alone for 30 years, and could at any time blab the awful things they know about the impending discovery of time travel and all the people they killed. Why not just send back a pile of gold and a thank-you card and let them have a dignified retirement and die of old age? There’s plenty of gold to spare, as time machines can make piles of it in a few hours. (Wait, what? See below.)

Also, those retired loopers may not be conveniently available for execution. It would be a bit awkward, wouldn’t it, if a looper died of cancer before their 30 year retirement was up. Or committed suicide the day before they were kidnapped, or spent those 30 years finding some foolproof way to hide. Or became President. Or ascended the criminal ranks until they were the one in charge of retired-looper execution. Or sneaked into a time machine after 29 years and got sent back to live their retirement a second time, except older and wiser and knowing when the stock market crashes.

By the way, did everyone notice that Bruce Willis was kidnapped in China, but appeared in a cornfield in Kansas? That means time machines are also teleportation devices that can move something human-sized from one spot on Earth to any other, undetectably. And instantaneously; in fact you can arrive a few minutes before you leave (which I suppose gives you time to make a quick phone call and confirm to yourself that you’ll get there safely). The people who own time machines could easily dispose of bodies by just teleporting them to the bottom of the ocean—no risk of time paradoxes.

In fact, since these outlaws with time machines can, and do, send themselves into the past to live and run criminal gangs, why aren’t they already in charge? Why haven’t they gone back to 2012, or 1812, to mess with history to their own advantage, so that when time travel is invented they’re ruling the world rather than having to hide murders from the authorities? They should be the authorities; after all, they have huge amounts of gold.

That’s because it’s easy to make staggering riches with a time machine; you just need a gold bar and a bank vault. Send the gold to the vault a week into the past. Go to the bank, check the vault—yep, one bar of gold—withdraw it, and repeat the process: send bar back, go to bank, withdraw bar, send bar back—all day if you like. Next, send yourself a note, a few days in the past, with instructions to go to the vault, withdraw the huge pile of gold that’s accumulated there, cash it in, and bank the proceeds, but—very important—leave one bar behind. Finally, check your bank balance: hey, you’re rich. Not bad for a day’s work, and no tedious messing about with ancient savings accounts and compound interest rates.

But what if past-you withdrew, oops, EVERYTHING from the bank vault and didn’t leave any seed money. Does the pile of gold suddenly disappear? Do you create a new parallel universe where past-you rich but a different future-you finds the vault empty? Now we’re dealing with time paradoxes. I’ll stop because we could be here all day. Making diagrams with straws.

The movie directly contradicts its own logic setup. It's internally flawed. The event at the end (was it his mother getting killed? I forget the exact details) can never happen the first time.

I always judge a movie by its own merits, and this was a fail. It's pointed out in many other reviews, too, so I could find the actual details if I needed to.

well millions of people beg to differ and when is the beggining for you 1999?

and i dont recall previous star wars films especially the original trilogy having forced stupid humour , jokes about mothers, using the words, god, bastard, spunk and arse, TLJ has hardly any battles, Poes super skilled flying ability against a super star destroyer aka Dregnaut , single handedly disabled all its surface canons, where as in Jedi it took a the whole rebel alliance to bring down even a single star destroyer, the first order chasing the resistence cruiser until it ran out of fuel ? can destroy solar systems but has to wait until a ship runs out of fuel to destroy it? why not just send in a shed load of tie fighters? Handing Luke his fathers lightsaber that hes not seen since he got his hand sliced , just tosses it away as if it was a stick. everything TFA built up story wise has been tore down by TLJ, snoke, Rey , Anakins lightsaber, its not terrible , but its nowhere near as entertaining.

As long as the movies make tons of money, they don't really care if the fans love them or not.