Review: Predestination

We start in 1975 with an unsuccessful attempt at thwarting the plans of a terrorist named The Fizzle Bomber. We then come back to 1970 and Ethan Hawke is working as a bartender when a patron calling themselves John (Sarah Snook) claims to have a doozy of a story for him. It’s a story of abandonment, identity, and even female astronauts. And then Hawke shows John something that may change not only John’s future, but the unhappy past too. Noah Taylor turns up as a recruiter for the space program.

 

Based on a Robert Heinlein (“Starship Troopers”, “The Puppet Masters”) short story, this 2014 sci-fi/time-travel film is the mild best film so far from Aussie writer/director team The Spierig Brothers (who previously gave us the tedious zombie flick “Undead” and the overrated vampire film “Daybreakers”). It’s better than the much-loved (for some reason) “Looper”, but I think “Project Almanac” still stands as the best time-travel film of recent years. At about 90 minutes, it’s far too short for a film that only introduces its time-travel element 50 minutes in, so that it ends up feeling like two ever-so slightly underdone films instead of one wholly realised film. And yet, both parts of the film are pretty interesting on their own. It’s definitely the Brothers’ most impressively-mounted film, with a really cool noir-ish look to it that I really dug. It’s somewhere in between “Darkman” and “Dark City”, and very, very slickly shot by Ben Nott (“Daybreakers”, “Skin Trade”, “Tomorrow When What Happened Was Yesterday After the Day Before Two Weeks From Today”- No, I won’t stop making that joke!).

 

I was all set to fry the film for being yet another annoying time-travel film where two versions of the same person interact (something I rarely buy in time-travel films), but…here’s one of the few times where it actually works. OK, so Sarah Snook here makes one think of Tilda Swinton doing a late-90s Leonardo DiCaprio impersonation, as coached by Hilary Swank. I couldn’t shake it from my mind throughout. However, while her performance initially comes off as a self-conscious and unconvincing gender-bender deal, by the end of the film, you absolutely understand that she and the Spierig’s know what they are doing here and Snook’s performance is as good as any actress could manage under these circumstances. I have to be careful not to reveal anything too secretive here (I don’t think it’s remotely a secret that the film deals with time-travel), but as much as I’m not 100% sure if the internal logic totally holds up, the film’s twists and turns really gave me pause about the whole ‘meeting your future self’ thing (Not that you should get too stubborn or nitpicky on something fictitious like time-travel, I suppose). I think these guys have found a way to make it work satisfactorily for me. If nothing else, the film is a really interesting spin on the idea, and it’s pretty damn audacious I have to say.

 

Still, this isn’t the great film many are championing it to be. You can see great fragments here, there’s potential for greatness overall, but it’s underdone (Another Aussie film, “The Infinite Man” does a lot of the things this film does, but slightly more satisfactorily). The film needed fleshing out, and promises more than it delivers, due to the constraints of its running time. That makes it a much more frustrating experience than watching something with far less ambition and potential. Boy, is there some really interesting stuff in here, though, and it looks terrific.

 

Rating: B-