Director Rian Johnson and stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Emily Blunt showed off their time-traveling hit man thriller Looper at Friday’s San Diego Comic-Con.

What’s Looper about? Here’s the official synopsis: “In the futuristic action thriller Looper, time travel will be invented – but it will be illegal and only available on the black market.  When the mob wants to get rid of someone, they will send their target 30 years into the past, where a ‘looper’ – a hired gun, like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) – is waiting to mop up. Joe is getting rich and life is good… until the day the mob decides to “close the loop,” sending back Joe’s future self (Bruce Willis) for assassination.”

The director and the footage shown went into greater detail about the movie’s time travel premise. Basically, in the future it’s become impossible to get away with murder or to even get rid of a body. So, since time travel exists but is illegal, the crime syndicates use it to send their victims back in time 30 years where loopers kill them and then dump the bodies. Even if the remains are found, no one will know who the hell the victim is because they don’t exist yet. But when JGL’s Joe tells his mob patron from the future (played by Jeff Daniels) that he’s leaving the biz and moving to France, he’s basically signed his own death warrant. See, “loopers” also refers to the fact that loops can be closed.

Johnson wrote the character with JGL in mind, but after casting Willis they realized they were going to need to rely on movie magic to make their older/younger versions be believable. JGL underwent three hours of prosthetics to better resemble the younger Willis, but Johnson and JGL both stressed that the goal was to embody Willis rather than mimic him.

JGL watched all of Willis’ movies multiple times, and then downloaded the audio to them and listened to them constantly so Willis’ voice and inflections would be second nature to him. JGL said how soft-spoken Willis is in real life, and that unlike guys who lack a presence who want to make themselves known he doesn’t need to raise his voice above a whisper to have a presence in the room. (more…)

The majority of physicists say time travel probably won’t work (at least in the Hollywood-go-anytime-you-wanna sense). Several time traveler parties have gone famously unattended by time travelers (at least, any willing to fess up about it). In general, science is kind of a buzz-kill on this one.

But if you want some justification for your daydreams, the person to talk to is Ronald Mallett, a theoretical physicists at the University of Connecticut who is most well-known for being the guy who thinks time travel is totally possible. (Mark wrote about him here back in 2007.) In fact, in 2006, Mallett predicted that time travel would be figured out within a decade.

I honestly have not researched this enough to give you my opinion on Mallett’s ideas. His fellow physicists have addressed it, though. You can read one response to Mallett at arXiv. All of that is a long, context-relevant introduction to the video above, where Mallett explains his theories. I wanted to post the video because it’s interesting and I thought you all would dig it. I’m also interested in the new video series this comes from—EPIPHANY, a daily video about big ideas taken from interviews with journalists, tech thinkers, scientists, and more. Mallett makes an interesting kick off for a series like this.

My hope, though, is that EPIPHANY doesn’t only focus on scientific ideas that are kind of on the fringe. There’s so many amazing discoveries that have the bulk of evidence behind them, it seems like a waste of a good platform to not cover the stuff that’s more likely to be true. (more…)

Writer-director Rian Johnson gave San Diego Comic-Con an extended peek at his new film Looper, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays a hit man who has to kill his future self, played by Bruce Willis. But Willis isn’t just out to save his neck — he wants to save the future from his past. Minor spoilers ahead.

The footage from the film, due out September 28th, re-explains and clarifies the plot: In the future, it’s impossible to dispose of a body, so the world’s largest criminal organization sends its targets back in time where hitmen called Loopers take out the targets. The targets always arrive at a specified time and place, with their heads covered and their hands bound. This leads to a somewhat comedic sequence of Gordon-Levitt’s Joe waiting in a cornfield in front of a sheet and shooting the pillowcase-hooded people who appear on that sheet out of thin air, day after day, over and over.

We get a scene between Joe and Jeff Daniels, his time traveling boss. Daniels tells Joe that Joe’s the youngest Looper he’s ever hired. With Joe coming to the end of his contract, Daniels asks him if he’s going to go off somewhere and learn Mandarin. “French,” Joe replies. “French?” Daniels sniffs, “Why are you going to learn French?” “Because I’m going to France,” says Joe. Daniels leans forward and tells him matter-of-factly, “I’m from the future. You should go to China.”

The organization has a neat method for retiring Loopers: they send the Loopers back from the future, just like any other target, and the Looper has to kill his future self. It’s called “closing the loop.” When Joe sees future Joe, though, he’s unhooded. Joe hesitates, and future Joe gets away.

We saw a longer version of the scene where Joe and future Joe meet in a diner. Future Joe tells Joe that he can’t look at him, it’s just too strange. “Your face is backwards,” younger Joe tells him. Older Joe begins to reprimand his younger self, pointing out that he’s a killer, a junkie, a loser. Then he asks Joe if he’s heard of the Rainmaker. Younger Joe knows that he’s the boss in the future. Well, older Joe has come back to prevent the Rainmaker’s rise to power. (more…)

Square-Enix is set to summon up something new for Final Fantasy XIII, as the devolper has promised information the future of that branch of the series on September 1, Andriasang reports.

At a fan event to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the series, the company will host a stage presentation they’re calling “Final Fantasy XIII Lightning Saga: New Developments Presentation.” The timing of the event dovetails fairly nicely with nicely with recent rumors suggesting a Final Fantasy XIII-3, and the reference to the series as the “Lighting Saga” pretty much stating that you’re getting more Final Fantasy XIII and you’re going to like it damnit.

Of course, any mention of Final Fantasy XIII tend to gravitate to the long missing in action Final Fantasy Versus XIII. The beguiled (and never confirmed for Xbox mind you) project has been in the works since its announcement in 2006. Recent reports from Kotaku however claim that Square-Enix might have finally shut down devolpment on the game, opting for a quiet cancelation with no formal announcement, lest the cancelation impact stock prices or public backlash.

The project has gone into long silence before, so there is always a chance it could remerge as we approach Toyko Game Show in September.

One of the most eagerly anticipated movies coming in fall is Looper, a time travel gangster flick from Rian Johnson (director of cult favorite Brick), starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis. Last weekend at Comic Con, we had a chance to sit down with Johnson and ask about his theory of time travel, as well as why this scifi trope fits so well into a gangster movie. His answers made us more excited than ever to see this weird twist on traditional time travel tales.

Looper takes place 30 years in the future, where a hit man called a “looper” (Gordon-Leavitt) works for a mob that exists 60 years in the future. The future mob sends its marks back to Gordon-Leavitt’s time, where the looper shoots them and disposes of the bodies — it’s the perfect way for the future mobsters to commit murder and leave no trace. The problem? One day, Gordon-Levitt’s future self comes through the time portal, and the looper is too surprised to finish the hit. So he has to track himself down in a bizarre cross-temporal suicide mob assassination. You can watch the video to see Johnson in action, or just read our interview below. (more…)