The idea of the Rainmaker as a Stable Time Loop makes no sense. We know that Bruce Willis killed his future self, so his future self didn't go after the Rainmaker, and HE STILL BECAME THE RAINMAKER! The only event that's happened that MIGHT prevent that future is that Sarah is now aware of the possibility, and will try even harder to raise him right...but, she was already trying to raise him right, so I don't know how much difference "try harder" will make...
- The answer to this is actually really simple. He's no longer set on the path to become the Rainmaker, because Young Joe spent time at the house, and taught Cid to love his mother just a bit more, as evidenced when Sid screams "Mom!" instead of Sarah, and how he lets her kiss him goodnight.
- Also alluded to by Word of God. Cid and Sarah didn't have the best relationship, and Cid alone, by himself almost killed Sarah on accident because he couldn't hold his temper. Where would the situation have gone if Joe hadn't shown up to force the situation of Sarah finally reaching Cid through his TK rage? He probably would have killed her just like he killed his aunt, and ended up the Rainmaker closing loops just because he didn't need Loopers any more. We saw that it happened with Joe not in the picture the first time around. Since he showed up, he was a stabilizing force for Cid to look up to, he took some of the pressure off Sarah, he got Cid to open up and he showed Cid what true sacrifice was. Not to mention helping Sarah finally get through to Cid about his gift. It might not change what happens next, but you can't deny that Joe's influence, plus all the money he left Cid and Sarah are going to be big factors in Cid's life. And knowing his mother is willing to die for him even though he told her numerous times that he hated her and she wasn't his mother? That's pretty powerful motivation for change. At the very least, his life is going to be a lot more sheltered and a lot more stable.
- The original backstory for the Rainmaker was never meant to be a Stable Time Loop; Old Joe's actions would simply have made it that way, ensuring it happened over and over again instead of by chance. The original timeline probably involved a completely different looper shooting Sara (or Cid's unnamed aunt) for completely different reasons, and Old Joe's actions almost causing the same thing are likely an attempt by the universe to stabilize itself.
The main page wonders a few times how Cid became the Rainmaker in the future if Old Joe wasn't around to kill Sarah. And it does seem like Sarah's a pretty good mother even before the Joes intervene, and it's unrealistic to think that she wouldn't eventually tell him that she's his real mother, though she'd probably wait until he was older and mature enough to handle it. But recall that Old Seth said that the Rainmaker appeared out of nowhere about 6 months ago relatively speaking, and Sarah said Cid was 10, leaving him 30 years to grow into what we can assume is Neo-Hitler. Presumably (and this is pure extrapolation) he saw that Humans Are Bastards and decided to kill them all. The possibility of Cid becoming the Rainmaker is still around, but Joe's sacrifice could at least inspire him to be a bit more benevolent about it.
- She lied about his age. Cid is a toddler/younger child. Hence the toddler toys and thick crowns. Plus *Sippy cup* Those are outgrown by five at the latest, no way would there be a sippy cup at age ten o.O
- She definitely lied about his age—he's five, as evidenced by the hospital number indicating he was born in 2039 when the main plot of the movie takes place in 2044.
- She lied about his age. Cid is a toddler/younger child. Hence the toddler toys and thick crowns. Plus *Sippy cup* Those are outgrown by five at the latest, no way would there be a sippy cup at age ten o.O
- She probably still died. '40s Kansas doesn't look like a particularly safe place to live, and as established in the film, she is reticent to shoot people. Plus, if Cid's in the mix as well, there is a pretty good chance of the situation going all chunky salsa. So then we have a dangerously unstable telekinetic wandering the badlands with the power to instantly kill witnesses, and a hatred of crime/vagrants. With even a little training, he can write his own check. If he can take power and kill the people he hates, Old Joe's life unfolds as it should. Then the Rainmaker decides to get rid of time travel, per the Evil Overlord List, but Old Joe nixes that.
- Though, the mounds of silver left on the farm by the Joes at the end of the film might have contributed to Cid and Sarah finding a better/safer life in the new time loop.
Seth fully believes that women are really into his TK (despite Joe telling him otherwise); Sarah makes a point of mentioning that she would use her own TK to suppress men's when they tried to hit on her, and that one of them burst a blood vessel in his eye trying to lift a quarter, which sounds fully in line with something someone as impetuous and frantic as Seth would do. But more importantly, it's assumed that Sarah's TK is unusual to find, especially in a woman. If she slept with someone else with TK, it would definitely explain why Cid is so super-powered: he got TK from both parents.
- Sarah mentions that she used to be something of a party girl in the city and knows what Loopers are, so it makes sense that they would have frequented the same few bars.
...because the film's present era (2040s) will soon develop the 'tracking' technology that detects murder and dead bodies. Once that's invented, the program's no good to anyone.
- This is pretty much confirmed in-universe, or at least heavily implied - he "saw his mom get shot" and "started closing loops like nothing else." These facts are most likely related, even without speculation.
His mother, being a person with an actual soul, decided to love him unconditionally despite his appearence, but smartly decided to cut the latter off and dye his hair to avoid Kids Are Cruel. As a result, his human-hating instincts didn't activate...until Old Joe killed his mom, which caused him to suffer a Freak Out and declare revenge against the only person who truly cared for him. Hence, he became the Rainmaker.
The alien artifact that gives the boys in Chronicle their telekinesis might not have been the only one of its kind. The three boys got such powerful telekinesis because they were so close to it, but if one was buried near a population centre, maybe limited proximity gives you just the ability to levitate quarters and such. This could also explain why Cid turned out so powerful: His father (or grandfather) may have been Matt, and apparently two TK bloodlines mixing amplifies the power.
Abe is from the future, and we see the younger version of everyone else sent back from the future (Seth, Joe). Abe and Kid Blue have similar hairstyles, both speak with Southern accents, and the ages match up. More to the point, after Old Joe pulls Young Joe away from his apartment he calls him a "stupid little shit." That's the same thing Abe calls Kid Blue in the very next scene. And since Abe died before Kid Blue, we never get to see if he would have vanished like Old Joe. Also, why would Abe keep around a screw up (who also looked up to him) if he was some nobody? The only real evidence against this is the hammer scene, but we don't know how prosthetics and medicine are in 2074. Rian Johnson says that he loves the theory, and that there is a deleted scene that deals with it in some way.
- A few cut scenes show that Abe puts a hit on Kid Blue after his mess up at the diner, so I think it's safe to say that, while it's possible in the final product, it wasn't originally Johnson's intention.
- Although if that had been kept in, it could be easily explained: Abe is sensing that the situation is growing steadily worse. He's putting the hit out as insurance; if Kid Blue does his job right and finds Joe, everything is saved and he can take a breather. If Kid Blue fucks up, he'd rather be erased from history than have to face up to the awful things that his bosses will do to him for fucking up. You think Seth had it bad? Imagining the Doc cutting bits off your younger self in front of you...
- There are two deleted scenes related to this; first Kid Blue is literally being dragged out the back of the club and down an alley by another Gat Man. Kid recognizes the spot as where fuckups are taken to be executed, and escapes after killing the other Gat Man with a holdout pistol in his boot. At this point Abe is absolutely sure Kid will be taken out the back and killed, sadly debunking the idea they are the same person. Much like Old Joe, Abe would only remember if Kid managed to escape after he did it.The second deleted scene involves Kid hiding out in a police cruiser and interrogating the officer about Joe when he returns; the officer apparently knows Kid and tells him Abe has put a significant bounty on his head. Before he's even finished trying to claim he'd never turn Kid over, Kid blows his head off.
- While I personally think Abe = Old Blue is unlikely, the movie's inconsistent depiction of the physical link between a person's young and old self provides conflicting evidence that can go both ways. Abe doesn't react at all to breaking Kid Blue's hand (not to mention he does it without hesitation) or the bullet he receives courtesy of Old Joe. Old Seth doesn't feel any pain from losing his fingers either - just horror and grim realization. This conflicts with the fact that Old Joe very clearly feels pain on both occasions Young Joe gets shot. So, is Abe's lack of reaction proof he's not Old Blue, or inconsistency on the movie's part? You decide.
- A few cut scenes show that Abe puts a hit on Kid Blue after his mess up at the diner, so I think it's safe to say that, while it's possible in the final product, it wasn't originally Johnson's intention.
1)The first thing you have to understand is that Old!Joe and Young!Joe are NOT, in fact the same person. They are similar iterations of the same entity from two different timelines. Every time you travel back in time in the Looperverse, you create a different strand of time. Similar, but with minor differences. Butterfly effects, and all that.
2) Why do Old!Loopers accrue the damage taken on by their younger counterparts? It is, according to Rian Johnson, the universe's feeble attempts to correct paradox. Thus, when you stab the eye out of a young looper and the Old!Looper loses an eye - it's not because you've literally changed the timeline of the Old!Looper so that he's always had a missing eye - it's the universe imposing the paradox on the Old!Looper as they exist NOW in the current timeline. So Old!Seth experiences bodyparts being removed from Young!Seth, but the fridge logic of how did Old!Seth run away if he didn't have freaking legs doesn't kick in. Old!Seth DID have legs. But the timestream is attempting to resolve a paradox by removing them when Young!Seth's are removed.
3) This is why Old!Joe doesn't change in attitude towards Cid and Sara even though Young!Joe has bonded with them. It's also why Old!Joe retains memories of the last bits of his life despite the fact that Young!Joe's actions should have put him on a different life path. Old!Joe's timeline and past remains unchanged, but he has some of the memories and scars of this Young!Joe because it is history trying to resolve a paradox. You can't change the past, but the universe will attempt to resolve paradox by imposing physical and mental changes on an Old!Looper. When Young!Joe commits suicide, this doesn't erase the events of the movie. It just causes Old!Joe to die because the universe resolves the paradox by making Old!Joe superficially match what has happened to Young!Joe.
4) You may notice the funniest part of this: Loopers are completely superfluous. When you send someone back, they end up on a completely different timestream with absolutely no way of returning. There is no way they can affect you anymore. Only Abe insists that there is one timeline, and he's making money off the operation. The mob of the future is literally sending tons of gold and silver back in time and into essentially other dimensions for no reason. Why? Because they're dumb mobsters who stole a time machine, not scientists.
- If nothing else, even if they (Joe) were in separate timelines, by traveling back and now existing in the same timeline, they, from the moment that Old!Joe first arrived, became the same person. That moment of arrival is what binds them together - up until then, they're separate.
- Aha! And Minority Report happens in 2054, ten years after this film is set!
- This is now my head canon!
Kansas 2044 represents a golden era where a criminal syndicate can operate in some measure of peace with enough vices to keep the Looper operation occupied and secret. It also has enough history and rule of law so the Mob knows everything that SHOULD happen in Kansas 2044 so the Loopers can move in without disrupting the timeline. By the time the economy or political climate changes to make this operation impractical, the loops are closed and another person like Abe is sent back to resume business.
While we do briefly see an actual technological time machine in 2074, this doesn't discount the possibility of there being a small child entombed inside of it.
Old!Joe wasn't erased at the end - the old adage, energy cannot be destroyed, only transferred. He got caught in the eye of the storm, a storm of horrible changes to time that careless, criminal time travel had caused. When he returned to his own time, the damage to the history of the universe in which he came from was so awful that everyone believed it to be 1997 rather than 2070, and that humanity was destroyed by a virus rather than damages to time. Joe ended up imprisoned below ground - along with all the other criminals who messed with time. Unfortunately, the damage to time also did damage to Old!Joe as well. He was de-aged a few decades and his long-term memory fried, so that he could barely remember any old information, just snippets (e.g., his name starting with a J). The council of scientists below ground clumsily identified him as an obscure ancestor of his and sent him back in time with the knowledge that he had survived it and could do so again. Ultimately, Old!Joe did get sent back in time to die...but was killed in front of his ancestor, James Cole.
Namely that time travel only works if a live human is sent back in addition to some small amount of cargo directly on his person.
When time travel was invented, the original goal of the Mafia was not to use time travel to dispose of bodies, but to send silver and gold back to manipulate the commodities markets and make a whole lot of money. The need to send a live human and the absence of volunteers for this one way mind scrambling journey made them decide to kill two birds with one stone. The Loopers are just not told the whole story, but a version where it sounds like their task is what is the most important.
- What the loopers are told is also to increase their psychological control, if they just hired random mooks to pick up billions of dollars in untraceable currency, there would always be theft problems. Loopers' loyalty seemed to be specially cultivated, with Abe hand picking those he thinks will buy in and be loyal. "Closing one's own loop" becomes a sort of morbid inventive not to steal and to stick with the organization, it is proof positive that even though you have been transporting billions of dollars, they let you live a full 30 or so years with the fruits of your labor.
- This could also explain why time travel would be outlawed due to the way it inherently involves a human 'sacrifice' of sorts.