“Predestination”

On an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, the results of a temporal anomaly puts one of the main cast face-to-face with an attractive woman he believes could be one of his maternal ancestors. The thought hits him: what if he was destined to travel back in time, fall in love with this person, and become his own great-grandfather? “This could be a predestination paradox!” he exclaims. It’s the sort of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey thought puzzle that drives hours of dorm-room conversations between philosophy and quantum physics majors. But to hang the plot of a movie around it, and expect it to stand up to scrutiny is a tall order. And the Spierig Brothers’ time-travel flick Predestination certainly gives it a go, committing to its central conceit without a hint of irony. But the science (and science fiction) doesn’t quite hold up.

Based on a Robert A. Heinlein short story, Ethan Hawke stars as a Temporal Agent working for a mysterious government body (or maybe it’s just Noah Taylor in a nondescript suit, as this agency is never fully fleshed out) chasing a serial terrorist known as the Fizzle Bomber—another temporally unstuck entity—though time. Along the way, he recruits a mysterious writer known by the pseudonym The Unmarried Mother (Sarah Snook). As The Unmarried Mother spins the sorrowful tale of their life, it becomes clear that they may be closer to Hawke’s Temporal Agent than anyone might realize.

It’s difficult to talk at length about Predestination without giving away key details. So consider this a spoiler warning. The time-travel plot device introduces the notion that a character could be his own parent—a chicken/egg conceit that is trotted out in as many words. Even twistier? At the heart of the tale is an out-of-left-field trans-narrative. This is where Predestination falls apart. The film (perhaps willfully) misapprehends the biological realities of intersexuality, and posits sexual assignment as an either/or equation. This can perhaps be explained away as retrograde ignorance during the time period in which the sequence takes place (that amorphous they-just-didn’t-know-better era known as “the past”), but the scientific explanation offered rings hollow. The psychological and emotional effects of the transition are barely touched upon—not when there’s cool time travelin’ to do.

However, the Speirigs’ aesthetic is charmingly lo-fi. Temporal jumping, for example, often happens offscreen, with props onscreen shaking and breaking in the wake of the time traveller’s path. The few action sequences play out like comic book panels: characters shrouded in shadow, blocked in graphically pleasing profile, or a mid-film jaunt to a ‘60s space-age recruitment office as imagined by The Jetsons. There are some mild pleasures to be had on a first-time watch, but repeated viewings are sure to decay with time.