Review: Predestination
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
The tension between fate and reinvention is loopily explored in the Spierig Brothers's latest.
City Paper grade: C+
Regret lies at the heart of most time-travel stories, the desire to somehow go back and unmake the mistakes of the past. The tension between fate and reinvention is loopily explored in the Spierig Brothers's latest, Predestination, which reunites them with their Daybreakers star Ethan Hawke. The actor plays a Temporal Agent, a time-traveling lawman out to stop a terrorist known as the Fizzle Bomber. He arrives in 1975 New York, where he sets up as a bartender and encounters a down-on-his-luck patron whose strange yarn quickly supersedes the action-movie premise suggested by Hawke's mission. The film is an adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's 1959 short story "All You Zombies," a sci-fi spin on hard-boiled detective fiction that could have made a nifty Twilight Zone episode. Though the Spierigs add a couple of extra knots to the ourobouros-like story, the unraveling of the convoluted tale means that the film spends too much time explaining itself to ever be fully engaging. And once the first few twists are revealed, the audience can easily iron out the remaining kinks long before the characters get around to them. There are delights to be found along the way in the retro-futuristic design of the film's alternative space-age history and especially in Sarah Snook's star-making, gamut-running performance.
