Predestination (review)

Predestination is a film released in January 2015. It stars Ethan Hawke, Sarah Snook and Noah Taylor. I'll give you the tl;dr right now, and it's not any more a spoiler than the first 5 minutes of the movie - it's a film adaptation of the famous Robert Heinlein short story All You Zombies.

If you have read that story, this review is simpler. Skip to the next section of this review, entitled 'So How'd It Go.'

The Short Course

Okay, I'll assume you haven't read the Heinlein story (why not? It's available online, google it). All You Zombies is one of the seminal time travel short stories. Works as diverse as Primer, Timewar, Looper, Timecrimes and even older stories such as The Stainless Steel Rat Saves the World all owe their existence to it - Heinlein just got there first. Wells wrote about time travel, to be sure - but his time travel was a curiously linear construction and served, mostly, as an 'alienating voyage' - since the Traveler could only move forward, the question of causality was not addressed.

Here are some basic plot points for you, from Predestination - which, I will say, is a very very (for a Hollywood Movie) faithful adaptation of the story. Ethan Hawke is our protagonist, who is a Temporal Agent. A Timecop. Yep. He works for a mysterious organization that polices time, as far as we can tell - also a trope. As we meet him, he suffers a defeat on the job in his long-time pursuit of the most famous unicorn of the Temporal Agency - the Fizzle Bomber, a mysterious assassin/terrorist who has famously killed numerous people with curiously limited explosions. In 1975, however, there is - or was - or will be, depending - a much larger blast which will kill thousands in New York. Hawke's character has spent his career trying to stop it.

And then one day he's bartending in the early 1970s when a stranger walks in and bets him a bottle of Old Underpants booze (direct from the story) that he has a stranger story to tell than the bartender has ever heard.

So How'd It Go?

The film is well made. It has a very understated but definite style - one which fits Heinlein very well. One thing that is confusing because it's not explicitly mentioned is that like the Heinlein story, all time past the 1950s isn't our time. In the story's case it's because it hadn't happened when the story was written - but in our case, it's because it's the alternate history of the Heinlein story. But to us, all the years in question are 'the past' and they look different - different enough to be confusing if you aren't familiar with the tale.

Let's talk about the acting. Ethan Hawke is fine, but to be honest, he doesn't have much to do other than to look like Ethan Hawke. He's playing the same slightly complex, very closed person he seems to play in lots of places, and it fits. He's like a less smooth Keanu Reeves - you cast him because you need 'that guy' and he does it well. Noah Taylor - from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and The Life Aquatic - has a smaller but critical part, and he's sort of the same - you need that guy. In his case, 'that guy' is a more talented turn, and he delivers.

The movie is straight up owned, however, by Sarah Snook playing The Unmarried Mother (yes, that's her character's name in the credits). She tackles by far the widest range of acting challenges, and meets and beats them, in my opinion.

So did it work?

No, I don't think it did, sadly.

There are two problems. The first problem is that, like the story and like most time travel stories of this ilk, most of the power of the film is derived from the tension produced by an internal plot point. I won't say twist, but that's sort of what it is. In addition, the 'external plot' - in this case, the chase for the Fizzle Bomber - suffers greatly due to the need to set up and nurture the internal plot.

The internal plot point isn't that hard to see coming (it's not really hard at all). The external plot suffers not only because it is being given short shrift to 'the clever bit' but because it's one that was tacked on to the Heinlein story. That was a short story which means that its power is derived almost entirely from the idea. To stretch it out to a credible movie, there had to be more to it - and while what was put in was fitted in to the Heinlein framework almost heroically well, there just isn't enough left over for it to shine.

Worth seeing?

If you're a fan of the story, I think it is. It's a paean to that story, and it's done, technically, very well. It's interesting as heck to watch someone else show you their imagined version of a famous work. Sometimes it works really well, sometimes it doesn't. This one is one of the well done ones.

If you're not aware of or a fan of the story, this is worth seeing because it is a competent time travel thriller. It's just not a super tight or powerful one, so I'd recommend catching it on a cable run or as an airplane flick. It doesn't need a big screen.

Predestination (listed 2014, released Jan. 2015)

Ethan Hawke - The Barkeep
Sarah Snook - The Unmarried Mother
Noah Taylor - Mr. Robertson