Well, he's been going on podcasts for months now with people telling him that the movie is structurally brilliant and perfectly written. I don't care how humble you are, that's gonna lift your ego a little bit. Rian Johnson is not an egotist by any stretch, but when people poke at your baby, you're within your rights to get annoyed.

By the way, I feel for Teague on this commentary. It hurt me that you guys are right.

Kevin Smith just released an episode of Smodcast, in which he talks to Rian Johnson about his films, including Looper:

http://smodcast.com/episodes/skip-to-my-looper/

Re: Kid Blue being Abe. Rian Johnson said in his 'in theatre' commentary that it was his favourite fan theory but didn't indicate that it was something he'd intended. There is also a deleted scene in the special features where one of the Gat men attempts to execute Kid Blue after Kid Blue hands in his gun. I took that as evidence that Abe and Kid Blue weren't originally supposed to be the same person as ordering your own execution is rather unwitty.

Also the switch from France to China was because a Chinese production company put in funding for the movie in exchange for having scenes in China. Originally Joe was actually supposed to go to Paris. It also resulted in the best line in the movie.

All you need to do is ditch the TK, fix the time travel and you have a solid film. You only need a couple of minor tweaks to pull that off.

THE SCENE. All horror movies put together have not effected me like that single scene did the first time I watched it. Thank you for sharing that nightmare fuel with me. However, when I started to think about it, questions started to arise, and the scene began to break for me.

SPOILERS:

The question that kept coming up for me is that if they were willing to horribly disfigure Paul Dano's character (Seth) in order to get his old self to come back, why not just kill the the young Seth? They wouldn't have to worry about a body, because the old Seth would just disappear like Bruce Willis did. I understand if they did this you wouldn't be able to have that scene, but its still broken for me now when it was intially jaw dropping.

I thought about Looper's time travel and I think I have a solution to the disfigurement/vanishing problem. Introduce a form of 'quantum entanglement' between future and present loopers. Here's how it works:

Old Seth jumps back in time. He now occupies the same 'moment' as Young Seth. Since they are basically the same person, they're almost identical on a atomic level (not 100% because one is older but this isn't Time Cop so it doesn't matter). We can nitpick and say that the body recreates different cells at different speeds etc but the bottom line is: there's enough young seth in the future version to make this work.

Now. Old Seth runs away, Young Seth gets captured. They put him on a table and blow his hand off with a shotgun or something. This doesn't cause the Future Seth to suddenly lose a hand but the atoms in his hand respond to what happens to their 'younger' counterparts. His arm starts breaking down on a molecular level mimicking what would happen to you if you tried to play baseball with a piece of a fuel rod from a nuclear reactor. This only works through space and not time so nothing is going to suddenly vanish from existence and create all sorts of continuity problems. That way you can still have a scene where Old Seth is racing through the city while falling apart and still make sense.

As for the ending:

Young Joe blows his head off = Old Joe's brain melts and he collapses instantly.

This setup also makes Joe's decision to kill himself more reasonable since Old Joe could've still managed to pull the trigger before his hand fell apart. A headshot would be the only way to go.

The only drawback of this magic bean is that you'd have to specify that the link only works one way. Otherwise the whole Looping business wouldn't work at all. (Well, that's not exactly true, you can still make it work but I haven't figured out a way around that problem without altering the structure of the movie).

I hope this makes sense

I understand what you're saying, I still don't understand why they wouldn't just kill young Seth if they're willing to dismember him. In your example, would they just be worried about the body then? I can't imagine having the body around would cause that much of a problem. What could the police determine, "Man, it's an old dead guy with a liquidfied brain, that's fucked up." They couldn't determine how he died from that.

To make Old Seth come back on his own. No cleanup, no questions asked. It's not so much about worrying, it's efficiency.

Why did they not just kill young Seth?
Did Abe not make it clear that he (they) won’t kill Seth because that would be too dangerous to the future?

RJ has said that time travel was not fully understood by the mobsters (they are criminals, not scientists) so that much of what they do is to not mess more with the timeline than absolutely necessary. That is why they close the loops by having the Loopers kill them selfs and thereby not affecting more people than themselves and the "marks" they are contracted to kill.

Alright, I have reached the level of "Shut up and enjoy the movie" haven't I? I can except the explanation of, their mobsters, not scientists. But I would think making a person a quadriplegic would endanger a person's fate almost just as much as killing him would.

I assumed that Seth's memories of his previously awesome 30 year retirement were being changed as he was dismembered, which was freaking him out as much as loosing body parts. If he did manage to get there quickly he figured he had a chance at a decent life? The theory only holds a bit of water. Presumably young Seth did not get a very nice retirement.

Just for my own sick gratification, would you say we also did that?