Screen Australia, Screen Queensland, Blacklab Entertainment,
Ethan Hawke, Noah Taylor, Sarah Snook, Freya Stafford, Cate Wolfe, Christopher Kirby, Madeleine West,
The Barkeep (Ethan Hawke) is actually a Temporal Agent (an undercover government group that uses time travel to go back and fix problems in time). He meets a young man named John (Sarah Snook) who tells him her story of how she was raised as a orphaned girl, but she was actually born with both sexes and a problem in her only pregnancy forced the doctors to choose on her behalf to turn her into a male. But the Barkeep is interested in recruiting her as a Temporal Agent and having John/Jane help him in fixing things so that he could capture and thwart the “Fizzle Bomber” who was causing havoc in the city. This complicated time travel journey is a complex film, based on the 1958 short story “All You Zombies” by Robert Heinlein, a well known science fiction piece that has taken decades to come to the screen.
First off, watch every minute of this film. It is very slow starting, and hard to pick up all the details you need to solve they mystery. The moment I finished it, I wanted to restart it, but I waiting until the next morning and watched it again. It’s an awesome, mind-blowing story. I am a sucker for time-travel stories, but this one really had me going. Many people miss the primary purpose of the story, but the title is Predestination. So the main focus is how no matter what we want to change, we end up on the path we’re supposed to. That doesn’t mean going back in time doesn’t change the future, but the world levels out in the end. The story is very complex, and the relationship of all the characters are important to understanding the story, but it’s a very cerebral and well constructed story. Ethan Hawke is really fantastic in this film, but Sarah Snook completely steals the show. Her performance is certainly Oscar worthy, and compared to Cate Blanchett playing Bob Dylan in “I’m Not There”, Sarah is 100 times better. This actress has impressed the heck out of me.
As teens, we spent many weekends and evening talking about the paradoxes and the possibilities of time travel. This story has a lot of paradoxes in it, and you can argue from now till eternity over the validity of the theories. But this movie is about Predestination, not about time travel paradox, and you’d need a time machine to have enough time to finish discussion about whether or not it’s even possible. Don’t waste you time with that, but enjoy this story for the wild and intriguing Sci-Fi treasure it is. There is certainly enough other topics in this movie to discuss. This is certainly one of my favorite films of the year and one that will make me think for a while! Now I can’t wait to read the original story!
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