The focus of the debate is whether the world view of "The Ring Messenger" is based on a parallel world or a single world. This argument is about whether there are serious loopholes in the film, and whether the loopholes are serious or not will determine whether this is a bad film under the banner of a "high IQ movie" or a good science fiction film following the "source code".
Carefully study the plot, "Loop Messenger" is probably not a story unfolding in the context of a parallel world. The most obvious reason is the memory of the returnees. Both Joe and Seth who have gone back to the past have memory ambiguity, because their return behavior disrupted the process of past events, causing the memory of new events to continuously affect their past memories.
In other words, after going back to the past and changing historical events, the old Joe's memories of Shanghai and "her" in the past 30 years have all become vain. The real memory, as the young Joe completes a new action each time it enters the old Joe's mind.
However, many fans have mentioned the issue of "grandfather's paradox", which is reflected in the film as "If Joe kills Rainmaker, how will the future Joe go back to the past".
Before solving this problem, we must first straighten out the timeline of the movie:
Joe became Looper and gradually discovered that his peers were constantly being "sealed";
large-scale "sealing" is actually the practice of a ruthless character in the future world, Rainmaker, because generally Sealing the ring is Looper’s personal wish, but apparently neither Joe nor Seth knew that he was going to be killed next moment;
Joe got a large sum of money after he was sealed, and then went to settle in Shanghai and met "her". She even
changed her mind and threw away her weapons; 30 years later, Rainmaker's men arrived as scheduled, but in the process of capturing Joe, they killed "her" at the same time, causing Joe to have the idea of revenge;
Joe killed Rainmaker's men, He went back to the past and stunned the young Joe;
this caused history to begin to change. For the young Joe, he did not know his "future", and the old Joe did not know his "past";
But the old Joe only knew that he wanted revenge and killed his childhood Rainmaker, so he kept searching, and finally found it; the
young Joe felt that the old Joe was a brain-disabled, and his blind revenge method eventually led to the rise of Rainmaker, and finally he chose to shoot it down. For himself, the elderly Joe also announced his disappearance from the long river of history.
The official timeline of the movie is probably like this. We found that, in terms of causality, without Rainmaker's rise, there would be no "her" death, and no old Joe would return to revenge. If the old Joe’s mission is successful, there is no need for him to go back in time and make trouble, and then this series of events will lose their source.
To solve this problem, you can refer to the method of solving the grandfather's paradox. There are two ways.
Method 1: "Killing the grandfather" becomes an impossible task.
Having a certain power to prevent "grandfather killing" is essentially a certain power to prevent the killer from eliminating the factors that led to the return to the past.
Therefore, A cannot kill his grandfather when he goes back to the past, otherwise A will not exist, and naturally there will be no A who went back to the past. However, in "The Ring Messenger", the young Joe finally committed suicide, causing the old Joe to no longer exist. It can be seen that the factors of going back to the past have been eliminated.
Therefore, it is not feasible to use method one to solve the problem.
Method 2: History is interfered, but the intervener never existed.
This is a very mysterious concept, but "Loop Messenger" can only be explained with this concept to avoid fatal loopholes.
In the grandfather's paradox, if A kills his grandfather, he disappears when his grandfather is killed. All subsequent history was reset to this point in time.
In "The Ring Messenger", after the young Joe committed suicide, the fact that the elderly Joe had killed the Quartet in the past has not changed, but others cannot know what sacredness caused so many gangsters and an innocent child to die. At this time, a bunch of "historical blind spots" are created, and these blind spots contain all the factors that caused a certain historical event to occur without being able to trace the source.
Compared with parallel universes or historical destiny to solve the paradox of time and space, this historical blind spot method is more tricky, and it can't help but say. But after careful consideration, it is actually quite an interesting proposition. The mysterious disappearance and disappearance of such-and-such person, the bizarre death of such-and-such person, and the missing of the murderer, could it be caused by historical blind spots? The object no longer exists in this world, how do you find things out of blind spots?
There is no cause and effect, and logical fans may scoff at this statement. The next person naturally expects a more rigorous explanation of the cause and effect of the event, but for the moment, it is better to make up for such a relatively flawless mechanism, which actually has another charm. From this supernatural phenomenon with no wind and waves, we seem to have discovered the absurdity of the world's deductive rules. Regarding history as the collection of all points between two parallel lines, we have observed that there are occasional (or a large number of) vacancies. These vacancies are blind spots. They will appear out of thin air (history is interfered and the intervener disappears) and suddenly disappear ( History is intervened, and the intervener still exists, that is, the solution to the problem of time and space travel in accordance with cause and effect). We may even encounter that, taking the line between a certain parallel line as the boundary, all points on one side of the boundary disappear (history is reset). In this kind of change is not centered, the past, present, and future are just relative concepts, and everything is just a point of constant change.
Although this kind of worldview is purely a personal brain supplement, it may not be conceived by the director himself, but this does not prevent the five-star evaluation of "Loop Messenger" below (as a commendation for its enlightenment). Of course, "Loop Messenger" is by no means a perfect work. The phenomenon and connotation of its time and space shuttle, there are too many places worthy of in-depth display, but the director has no time to take care of it.
However, the director has embedded a variety of interesting overtones within a limited time. One example is the large-scale cleaning of Looper. According to the final vision/prediction/imagination of the young Joe, Rainmaker witnessed his mother being killed by the old Joe who was Looper when he was young. After he grew up, he abused his superpowers to become a hero and avenged his mother for 30 years. In the inherent history of the old Joe, Rainmaker rushed to kill Loopers, which made people speculate that there was blood and blood feud between each other, which also corresponds to the "fate theory" of the young Joe. In the old history, it was not the old Joe who had grieved with Rainmaker, because the old Joe had no memory of killing Rainmaker's mother or having an affair with Rainmaker. The director didn’t clearly say who it was. Maybe it was Looper who was killed in the room in the new history. Maybe it was Seth. Maybe it was the second person who played guns all day. Maybe it was Rainmaker’s birthday and birthplace. Tell the informant of the elderly Joe. No matter what the truth is, this side narrative technique traces the motives of Rainmaker's murder and hints at the origin of various tragedies, which is another highlight of "Loop Messenger".
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