Predestination: Playing with Paradoxes – TADFF

It starts with a gun fight and an explosion. Extensive burns and facial reconstruction, and when the bandages come off Ethan Hawke stares back, with the off-handed comment that his face looks so different that “even my mother wouldn’t recognize me”. He has one final mission, he wants to stop the “Fizzle Bomber,” and, yup, none of the characters are impressed with that name.

Predestination is the new film from the Spierig Brothers, twins Michael and Peter, in their first work since 2009’s Daybreakers (also starring Ethan Hawke).

Together they wrote and directed this time travel feature which revolves around, not the traditional hunt the criminal plot, but the story of how a Temporal Agent was recruited. This is a world where the Space Corps also had a female component who accompanied austronauts into space, for ‘relaxation’.  Where an orphan Joan (Sarah Snook) was always top of her class (except for charm lessons) and often in fights with both girls and boys. Where, despite not making it into the Space Corps, she was promised by Mr. Robertson (Game of Throne‘s Locke – Noah Taylor) that there was a role for her in a special secret agency, as one of the elite.

Some testing in the Space Corps is almost as fun as the outfits!

The film was inspired by a Robert A. Heinlein short “All You Zombies”, so much so that he was given a writing credit. This could be construed as a spoiler.

This is a tautly written tale, which explores time paradoxes, and what shapes your identity. What is inevitable, and what is everyone looking for: love, or at least purpose. There’s a question that’s repeated, “What if I could put him in front of you, the man who ruined your life, would you kill him?”

The story of Jane – powerfully portrayed by Sarah Snook.

A huge shout out to Sarah Snook (Australian TV Show Spirited) whose performance is nuanced and natural and is the focal point of the film. Ethan Hawke, fresh off the 12 year “Boyhood“, is the experienced temporal agent/recruitment officer, and is able to draw Snook’s character into a lengthy discussion. So despite the clear stated goal of stopping the “Fizzle Bomber”, this is not a heist film, or a chase film. If anything it’s a character study and a meditation on what it means to be human, and if who and what we are is mere predestination.