That's funny, cause for me its the opposite. I find it much harder to be scared in a movie theater full of other people than just watching something by myself, alone at night.

Ya, the more I think about it, the more I think that the 2-act movie structure isn't necessarily the problem in and of itself, it just isn't executed well enough. Cause while I do wish it was a movie about the 1st half, I think you're right that Johnson goes out of his way to tie the 2 halves together thematically, there's a lot of connective ground-work subtly laid in the 1st half based around the cycle of violence concept, and it is clever to use time-travel to address this idea.

And intellectually, I love the idea of this crazy sci-fi time-travel movie suddenly turning into a Western for the 2nd half. I just don't think he nails the execution. Western's deal in very specific and clearly laid out character relationships that build to a face-off. I think that for the ending to work, it needs to be clearly established before the climax that Joseph Gordon Levitt is going to protect this kid no matter what. It should be a Ripley/Newt kind of connection, and I don't think the movie earns or establishes this strongly enough. I can't articulate it specifically, but it feels like there's a beat missing there to me. I just do not at all buy young Joe's decision at the end, and so instead of feeling "Of course, he's willing to sacrifice himself to stop the cycle", I'm thinking "that was super out of character and kinda random on his part".

More crucially, I think there needs to be some kind of face-off with Bruce Willis. The climax of this story is a moral debate between young and old Joe, and I wish Johnson had embraced the Western aspects more and given us a stronger showdown between the two of them. As it is, they talk for like 10 seconds, and then the useless Mr.Blue character shows up and distracts us from the central conflict (that guy is one of the strongest arguments for why this is not a perfect screenplay).

And of course, as has been said, the whole TK thing is a 2nd magic bean, and I really don't see a need for it in this story. Kid doesn't need to have Telekinetic powers to be a big bad guy in the future, it's enough seeing that he's super smart and having that amazing child actor that they got. I dunno, giving him mutant powers just seems like a weird choice.

Ultimately, I just think the story could've used another draft to tighten it up a bit and build things up a bit more, the 2 act structure can work (and almost does), but it's just missing a couple beats.

Ya, this episode is very much a spiritual sequel to "Blink", really liked how they used River's detective story.

Ya, I remember the marketing being really effective, going into it initially a lot of people thought it was real footage, which the trailers and everything re-inforced with how raw it was:

It was a huge hit too, it made 250 million worldwide on a $60,000 budget.

I guess here's my beef with it. It starts out being a movie about Loopers and that concept, and then after the diner it almost completely shifts into being a movie about "what if we could kill future sci-fi Al Capone in the past".

Both ideas are interesting, but I think the movie would've been better off choosing one to run with. I definitely do not think it's a perfect movie/screenplay.

You look at the Looper side of the story, the present-day mob ends up being mostly throw-away in the 2nd half. You spend time setting up Jeff Daniels like someone important, then he doesn't even get an on-screen death, and his entire gang is wiped out in 2 minutes of screen-time. This feels pretty sloppy to me, the movie is basically relying on us going "well it's like one of those Bruce Willis movies where he kills everything", when the 1st half feels a lot more grounded and dangerous to me.

Now lets look at the future Al Capone part of the story. In my opinion, there's not enough time spent setting up what is essentially a moral dilemma (that ends up being wrapped around a time loop, but still). Crucially, I think we get far too little information about who the Rainmaker turns into in the future. There was like one 5 second bit of a news report, and 2nd hand information that he's running all the gangs and killing all the Loopers. To me, that's not setting up enough of a danger, unifying the gangs might be a positive thing, and the Loopers kind of deserve it (and sign up for it in their contract if I understood correctly?). I feel like we need to see more of what he's actually been doing in the future, it would work better for the story if he was really, really bad news, like Genocidal or something, but they don't really set him up that way.

Now in the present part of the storyline, it seems that future Joe has very little to do in the second half of the story. I give them points for having the balls to have him murder a kid, but that's basically it, he barely exists in the 2nd half of the story, and him and young Joe don't interact at all till the last scene.

In fact, and this is what I've been getting at, you could remove the "Looper" aspect from the 2nd half, and tell almost the exact same story ("time-traveler comes back from the future to stop future evil, do I let him?"). This is the central dilemma of the 2nd half, and I don't feel like there's enough setup for it, nor is there enough discussion of it, the end feels extremely abrupt.

It really feels like 2 awesome separate stories kind of awkwardly smashed together, both kind of under-developed in the end, which is a shame cause about an hour in I'd have said this really is an instant classic.

Because again, you could take this same exact script, and just by restructuring certain set-pieces to make more sense chronologically (have the med-pod surgery AFTER things have gone to hell and Shaw is escaping), and trimming out some of the dumber ideas at play (LETS COMMIT SUICIDE AND RAM THIS SHIP GUYS......SOUNDS GOOD TO ME), already have a pretty damn good sci-fi movie in combination with the visuals.

Part of the pissed off reaction is how close the movie comes at times to being the great sci-fi epic people want it to be. I firmly believe that a more competent writer could've taken the same exact input from Scott and delivered a great movie out of it.

EDIT: Actually really tempted to try to fan-edit this thing

Only way they can rescue it is if the sequel follows totally different un-related characters in a different story and never acknowledges what happened to Shaw or the rest of the team. That's another bizarre thing about this movie, because it seems to want to deliberately explain nothing and leave things open for a direct sequel, but it fucks it up by ending in a way that pretty much guarantees there's no way you could do a direct sequel without it being the dumbest thing imaginable.

I tip my hat to thee

Best Campaign Ad ever, West Wing cast reunites:

You mean the way the rest of the prequel trilogy totally redeemed Phantom Menace? Ya, I'm not holding my breath (although they're dumping Lindelof from the sequel, so maybe they realized how much he fucked up and will get someone to fix it)

Yep, extremely Kubrickian in how it is utterly fascinating and riveting despite very little plot. You can take almost any 2 minutes of that movie out of context and it's still totally engrossing, just look at some of the teasers P.T. Anderson cut for it: