Looper

Looper doesn't just use the idea of time travel as a convenient jump-off for a doppelgänger showdown. Neither is it just about a person's reaction to foreknowledge, and a perceived ability to steer their life in a desirable direction. Instead, Looper's system of time travel seems to have mutated society in every conceivable direction. The economy has collapsed, perhaps because of incessant future guy interference, and created a neo-depressed world in which there is an overwhelming amount of have-nots. They line the streets, gunning each other down over scraps while an entitled criminal class steer their sports cars and hover bikes around them. I think we see the Police a grand total of once - they're even less effective here than in a James Cameron film.

Everything is dreadful, and everybody hopes for escape. It's a beautiful piece of world building by writer / director Rian Johnson. He's created a system that functions on the whims of an all-powerful unseen, his greed and avarice steering humanity right into the ground. We get to see the aftershock of intruding into the past to stack the odds solely in one person's favour. This is Biff Tannen's 1985, billeted with self-policing contract killers that drop Cowboy Bebop drugs and dream of terminating themselves. The damage is done. Somebody has lost. The only hope for mankind is that in one possible future, the man who becomes Bruce Willis found it in himself to stop being a dick for five minutes and fell in love with a nice Chinese lady.