Film Review: ‘Predestination’ is a time-travel triumph
“Predestination” is a time-travel movie, and time-travel movies are difficult — but not impossible — to pull off convincingly. More than most science-fiction subgenres, they seem to have one foot in the world of sheer fantasy. That is, we can imagine seemingly intelligent robots; we can envision a journey to Mars; even those advancements that seem to defy physics — interstellar travel, for instance, or brain transplants — are simply extreme versions of things we recognize from the real world. They’re unrealistic in terms of quantity, not quality.
But time travel... We can imagine it, but we have no real way to conceive of it. Roombas may be primitive robots; a trip to the moon is a smaller version of the experience of a trip to Mars; but there’s no such thing as a “little” time travel. It messes with the very fabric of reality.
Of course, it’s that very aspect that makes it fascinating, and most such tales revolve around the resulting paradoxes.
“Predestination” is one of the most perfect time-travel movies ever made, partly because the Spierig Brothers (“Daywalkers”) — the Australian twins who wrote and directed the film — have been smart enough to start with what may well be the most perfect piece of time-travel fiction ever written. Robert A. Heinlein — who, during the ’60s, was probably the second most famous sci-fi writer, after Ray Bradbury — wrote “—All You Zombies—” in 1959. Thematically and structurally, it was a extension of his 1941 “By His Bootstraps,” which is less complex and several times as long. They changed the title presumably because “zombies” has specific meanings and associations now that barely existed 55 years ago.
The Spierigs have stuck closely to the original, except for some embellishments that help deal with those aspects of the story that otherwise would have made a film version impossible. There is almost no way to go into the details of the plot without spoiling some great surprises, so we’ll try not to go beyond what the filmmakers and star Ethan Hawke have discussed in interviews.
In 1970, a man who makes his living writing unwed-mother stories for “true confession”-style magazines walks into a bar. The bartender (Hawke) wants to know how he can write so convincingly from a female point of view. The man explains that he used to be a woman named Jane (Sarah Snook), but had to unwillingly undergo gender reassignment. In flashbacks, we learn how Jane was repeatedly abandoned and thwarted in all her ambitions.
Actually, the bartender knows all this, because he’s a sort of temporal fixer. Time travel will be invented in a few years, and a secret government agency sends people back to rearrange things. He intends to do some monkeying with Jane’s past.
What ensues is an extraordinary Moebius strip of events that, unlike most similar plots, wraps itself up perfectly.
Because of the time-travel element, the story leaps around in time... in a sense. Even though the bartender does a lot of past-future hopping and “listens” to the flashbacks we see, the narrative is essentially chronological from his point of view.
As mentioned above, the short story had twists that should have made it unfilmable, but the Spierigs add a subplot about a mad bomber, which helps smooth over these problems. They also use a visual style that allows them to fool us at times without drawing attention to itself (as in the “Twilight Zone” episode “Eye of the Beholder”).
Hawke is perfectly solid here, but Snook gets the juicy part, playing both a man and a woman. She’s convincing enough as a man that I had no idea it was her; I was quite certain throughout the film that it was Edward Furlong, doing a fine job of adding just a hint of femininity to a male role. So: kudos to Snook.
If you have any taste at all for time-travel plots, this is not to be missed.
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ANDY KLEIN is the film critic for Marquee. He can also be heard on “FilmWeek” on KPCC-FM (89.3).