Predestination (Spierig Brothers, Ethan Hawke) Review (Toronto After Dark) (1 Viewer)

The story is tricky to synopsize without spoilers, but the broad strokes of it have Ethan Hawke playing said temporal agent, in pursuit of the mysterious "Fizzle Bomber", a mass murderer who's eluded capture time and time again. True to the movie's tagline — "To save the future, he must reshape the past." — he's sent back to 1970 New York City, five years before the bomber strikes his most vicious blow. There, he meets John (newcomer Sarah Snook, in a gender-bending role), a man of crucial importance to the cause, and sets about trying to convince him to join the Temporal Bureau.

As the film progresses, the pieces of its puzzle gradually fall into place, and we begin to realize how the lives of John, our temporal agent and the Fizzle Bomber are intertwined. Suffice to say, the revelations are mind-bending and will come completely out of left field for anyone unfamiliar with the source material. Much more intelligent and emotionally resonant than your average save-the-world-through-time-travel movie, Predestination reflects the core themes of Heinlein's original short story — concerning the immutability of destiny — through a skillfully constructed narrative and wonderfully acted performances from Hawke and (especially) Snook. But you can just think of it as the time-travel genre's answer to Fight Club.

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SamT said:

I don't understand the appeal of the movie. Making complicated and twisted plots just for the sake of it, don't work for me.

I really dislike movies like this that are just trying to be gimmicky. I'm not even sure if the story is coherent.

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