Best sci-fi movie of the 2010's (so far)

Plot contrivance: Time to get SUPER DEEP. If you already feel dizzy skip this one altogether. Even if time travel is all fiction, you have to obey your own rules because if you don’t – it creates what we call a ‘’technical clusterfuck’’ that doesn’t make any sense when you try to decipher it. Here we go.

On one side, you have the alternate timeline mythology of the screenplay where Old Joe’s past reveals that young Joe killed old Joe when he was young. He got his gold and lived happy for 30 years before being sent back in time. At that point, Old Joe knows about his fate and decides to alter it by surviving his execution. This creates an altered timeline both different and independent from the previous one. Indeed, if it was not independent, Old Joe would have been unable to change his fate; he would have been killed no matter what he tried to do. So the movie firmly established that you can alter your fate and create a new alternative timeline for yourself.

On the other side, you have aspects of a single loop-timeline mythology where what happens to young loopers also happens to old loopers. So for example, when young Seth is tortured and his limbs are cut off, older Seth in the present also gets scarred.

But this doesn’t work. If young Seth gets one finger cut-off, he will grow older missing one finger – let’s call him Old Seth B. But Old Seth A from the original timeline who is right beside him in the present should not be affected by that because he doesn’t belong to this new future anymore. It is confusing to see both the young and old versions of Seth as the same person. At this point in time, being in the present together, they should be seen as brothers. If one gets killed – it’s sad, but the other older brother doesn’t get physically hurt. He is not in the future anymore – he is independent from whatever happens to this man, because his own future was dictated by his own younger self version that stop being his version the moment he altered the timeline by surviving his fated execution. In short, whatever happens to Young Seth B will affect Old Seth B, but the Old Seth who altered the timeline and is living in the present now is not Old Seth B, it’s Old Seth A.

TL/DR: Young Seth gets his limbs cut off: nothing should happen to Old Seth. Young Joe kills himself: nothing should happen to Old Joe, he would just be amazed by the gutsy and stupid move of his younger self and would proceed to kill Cid’s mom.