Fun and exciting. Just don’t think about it too hard. Unfortunately, I had to.

I love the idea of time travel. I fantasize about it a great deal: going back and stopping 9/11, going forward and finding out the right lottery numbers, visiting ancient Greece to see the Parthenon in its original form, or to 1970s San Francisco to visit pre-AIDS Castro. I’m always excited by time travel stories, from those great Star Trek episodes, to HG Wells’ The Time Machine, even to dorky shows like Quantum Leap. But when the time travel involves people visiting themselves in the past and trying to fix the future, things go awry, because the paradoxes start piling up. I either get annoyed or I have to force myself to ignore the annoyances. I had to do this with the Terminator franchise and with Heroes; if I thought about it too much, I could poke holes in the plot and my enjoyment would stutter. This is how I felt while watching Looper, the brainy, mostly thrilling new time travel thriller starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Bruce Willis’s younger self. Continue…