“Concerning the first issue, there’s no reason why on God’s green earth a toddler should be trading dialogue with Joseph Gordon-Levitt. That’s just bizarre.”

Why is that bizarre in a time travel movie?  Please elucidate.  

“How sad to see that tired old stock horror movie trope “the evil child” trotted out, followed closely by its dim-witted cousin “the unknowable genius”.” 

Can you provide alternate examples of these archetypes?  I’ve seen a lot of movies with evil children and/or geniuses, and it’d help my understanding if I knew specifically what other movie or literary characters fall into these tropes.

“But stories with telekinesis need a different aesthetic approach.”

Why?  This blanket statement and several similar vague generalizations seem to imply that there is only 1 correct way to write or tell a story about a given subject.  That seems a bit myopic and prejudicial, and these statements would have a lot more credibility with a bit less “This is the way things SHOULD be” and a bit more explanation.

“In the case of “Looper,” telekinesis being a more “agented” sort of magic, the creepy Rainmaker kid functions as an awful Deus Ex Machina…the Rainmaker character doesn’t serve as a Deus Ex Machina at all.”

Which one?  Deus Ex Machina has a fairly specific definition.  Either the kid (or some of his actions) was thrown in to magically solve major plot issues… or he wasn’t.  Without better justification and explanation, these really just kinda feel like an excuse to use the phrase.  Deus Ex Machina does sound and look pretty awesome in print.  It’s even awesomer when used correctly and explained fully.  I’m willing to hear the argument, but I need more to go on.

“….the flaw that I mean has more to do with tone than plot. Because tonally the telekinesis and time travel don’t run parallel at all, but intersect often and clumsily. Once telekinesis is introduced as a serious force in the story, all the carefully crafted tensions inherent to the time travel aesthetic are (literally) exploded. Once the audience sees a kid who can overturn a truck with his mind, watching a man disappear to a different timeline seems hollow and pointless, a plot contrivance.”

Why & How?  This is a great introductory paragraph, but requires greater explanation.  As written and without further clarification, this comes across as a subjective opinion being stated as fact.  Why is simply throwing a truck more impressive than wiping out someone’s entire existence?  Are you saying that telekinesis would somehow stop time travel?  What, exactly, the hell is going on here?

When you don’t even understand what a Deus Ex Machina is, I can’t be surprised at this fairly shallow review of Looper.  This isn’t a movie about time travel, or telekinesis, or anything else like that.  This is a movie that asks the question – if you could go back in time and kill Hitler, would you?  Time-travel is the way the movie asks interesting moral questions, not the point.  TK is the macguffin; not all that important to the plot, as it turns out. 

 Which is where all the heart of the film lies: it’s not certain, it’s just a hope. which is all any parent has. The “Hero Decides the World is a Better Place Without Him ” thing still pisses me off, but it was still worth it.

Hitler did not (as far as we know) possess TK powers, yet he still ended up dangerous- so calling the kid a super TK dude just makes the danger foreseeable. The story would still work if he was dangerously hateful yet charismatic, it just would have been slower to tell.

As a physics geek I gotta say a few things about this: first off, I believe you’re thinking of the second law of thermodynamics, the third law is about entropy going to zero at a temperature of absolute zero. And the second law of thermodynamics only applies to isolated system, and is about what happens in the limit as the amount of time passed goes to infinity; if your system is an isolated room with a time portal in it that allows anything in the room to travel to the same room at an earlier time (or travel forward to the same room at a later time), how would the time portal allow you to circumvent the second law? Also, I think time travel doesn’t automatically put a story in fantasy territory: it turns out that in Einstein’s theory of general relativity, there are certain theoretical situations that would allow for “closed timelike curves”, or objects which loop back in time and encounter (or become) their own selves at that time. Physicists suspect that quantum effects will probably out these possibilities (Hawking’s chronology protection conjecture) but they don’t dismiss them out-of-hand, and certainly don’t use thermodynamics to dismiss them, anyone who’s interested in the subject can read a book like Black Holes and Time Warps or Time Travel and Warp Drives, both by physicists who specialize in general relativity.