Bruce Willis plays Joseph Gordon-Levitt's future self in "Looper."

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

(CNN) -- "Looper," this past weekend's mind-bending futuristic thriller from writer/director Rian Johnson, follows "The Terminator's" time traveling mantra: There's no fate but what we make. The destiny audiences forged helped "Looper" land at the box office in second place, earning the film a cool $21.2 million. Not bad for an R-rated action flick whose big questions would have made sci-fi novelist Philip K. Dick smirk.

In the film, bottom barrel assassins are handpicked to do the future mobster's dirty work by killing targets in 2044, 30 years before time travel is even invented. Unfortunately, the hit men collecting silver bounty off of bodies sent to the past tend to die young (sort of). They retroactively commit suicide by murdering their future selves, giving them three decades to live life to the fullest. It's also full of space-time paradoxes. What if you could change the future by altering the past? That's precisely what happens when Joe the looper, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, makes the mistake of letting his future form, played by Bruce Willis, escape.

Time travel is obviously a sci-fi staple, but sometimes it's best to keep things simple.

"We'll be sitting here all day making diagrams with straws," Bruce Willis yells at his younger self after being hounded by questions about the history of things to come. But believe it or not, there are scientists who study the real world possibilities of time travel, and it's a lot of information to sip up.

Combating bad pop culture time travel

Joseph Gordon-Levitt in 'Looper'

Meryl Streep in 'The Iron Lady'

Robert Downey Jr. in 'Tropic Thunder'

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A look at 'Looper's' potential for real world time travel