Guest Column: Four heads exploded, ‘Looper’

The MHCC Mad Scientists club went to see the movie “Looper” last Friday to provide a review from a scientific perspective, to check out some of the technologies on display and their basis in science.

“Looper” takes place in the year 2044. Time travel won’t be invented for another 30 years. Once it arrives, it’s quickly outlawed and only crime syndicates use it in secret. New technology makes it nearly impossible to murder someone and dispose of the body, so the syndicates send their victims back to the past. They arrive bound and with a bag over their head, and are immediately killed and disposed of by a hired gun, a “Looper.”

The main character is Joe Simmons (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a Looper. He’s simply making a buck until he can retire and live the good life. His plans undergo a cataclysmic shift when his older self (Bruce Willis) is sent back to be killed by him. Everything goes wrong for young Joe when his older self escapes, leaving both Joes being hunted by the syndicate.

The backdrop is a dystopian future, but new technologies are all around. They include super-thin folding phones, hover bikes, the fuel systems for cars, the guns and, of course, time travel. We also see some people who have genetically gained the ability of telekinesis.

Ultra-thin folding screens such as those seen in “Looper” do exist now, but not at the consumer level. The latest screens in smart phones are called AMOLED (Active-Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) screens. They are flexible and can be bent or folded. The changes have been modest, but there’s much more to come. Actually, the biggest barrier fully folding phones is battery technology. We’ll need much smaller batteries before we see any Looper-style phone.

As for cars of the future, things look a lot different in 2044. The cars have solar panels and hoses attached to the gas tank that snake around the vehicle to other locations. This alludes to the reality of peak oil we face now, the fact Earth has only so much oil and it’s not all easily accessible, even as world demand grows. Obviously, the cars in “Looper” no longer run on oil, but on solar along with what we believe is a hydrogen fuel cell system jury-rigged to supply what is most likely an electric car. These are alternative fuel technologies already being pursued in the automotive industry, as oil becomes more scarce and costly.

Cars may remain ubiquitous, but the most important aspect of the movie is time travel. Current thinking on time travel tends to deem it impossible. Still, there are possibilities left open with the Theory of Relativity that space and time could be bent in such a way that it may be possible. Also, it should be noted that time travel is possible in a limited sense not usually explored in books and movies. The faster an object is moving, the slower its time moves relative to the time passing for objects around it. In this way, it is possible to travel into the future, but not the past.

This aside, time travel presents unique problems here, in that the entire movie could cease to exist simply by someone travelling to the past before the movie started and killing off our main character. The movie suggests this would be a very bad thing, but doesn’t go any further. We are to assume that time is “elastic” and will try to return to the shape it already was when any changes occur. Even though time travel a la “Looper” appears to not be possible, it still makes for a fun movie and a great plot device.

We immensely enjoyed the movie, both from a scientific and personal perspective. It was a fast-paced ride that never lost our attention, with great acting and a plot set against an intriguing future. Our only complaints would be about time travel as mentioned above, and that the ending could have come a minute or two sooner. We wholeheartedly recommend “Looper”! Just be careful not to leave any brain fragments on the chair if your head does explode.

Jeremy Likens is the President of the MHCC Mad Scientists Club.