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Movie Review: 'Predestination'

By Bill Wine
KYW Newsradio 1060

PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- It's about time. Predestination, that is. About fate, too. And identity.

It's an intricate and unorthodox science fiction thriller and psychological drama about a temporal agent, so-called because he travels through time to prevent major crimes before they occur.

And Predestination is as paradoxical a movie as its central conceit – ho-hum-here-we-go-again time travel -- is a sci-fi conundrum.

That is, it's head-scratchingly confusing at the same time that it compels and fascinates.

2½ stars
(2½ stars out of 4)

Ethan Hawke stars as a world-weary but determined agent posing as a bartender so he can operate undercover as a sympathetic listener. He never deviates from his mission of returning to the past to rectify a wrong or to alter and improve or preserve the future. But we're reminded, as he is, that the past is difficult to change and that some things are inevitable no matter what you do.

His final assignment: to catch the one criminal, a terrorist called the Fizzle Bomber, who has managed to elude him for decades and who now threatens to set off a bomb in New York City. He teams up with a cynical, sexually ambiguous recruit played by Sarah Snook, a little-known actress from Australia, playing a guy who writes under the pseudonym, The Unmarried Mother. Say what?

Let's put it this way: he's trying to change history while "she" is trying to find her place in the world that he's changing.

And Noah Taylor plays the enigmatic Mr. Robertson, about whom the less said the less spoiled.

Needless to say, where you stand with regard to the time travel paradox – and the strange time travel device on display, a "coordinate transformer field kit that resembles a violin case -- will dictate the way you respond, at least initially.

Later, you'll give yourself a headache putting all the pieces together, but that probably won't stop you from trying.

Written and directed by the Spierig Brothers (Australian identical twins Michael and Peter) – makers of Daybreakers and Undead -- and based on the short story, All You Zombies, by Robert A. Heinlein, Predestination drops pieces of the perplexing puzzle in front of us along the way without making the connections clear. But events are not so confusing as to disenfranchise anyone willing to think about them. In other words, cerebral stimulation is in long supply.

As we bounce around through the various decades, we get glimpses of alternative futures and pasts, societies and environments that look the same as we expect yet different in ways that are not always easy to decipher. But this is one of those movies that demonstrates over and over again that you don't have to understand everything on-screen to enjoy and appreciate it.

Nonetheless, you are hereby challenged to describe the fully detailed plot to somebody out loud. Come to think of it, don't. Your listener may want to see it.

Hawke lives up to his reputation as a solid and reliable leading man, and Snook, who pretty much steals the film with her unforgettable characterization, is a real find.

So we'll travel through 2½ stars out of 4. Wildly unpredictable, the complex, mind-bending sci-fi yarn, Predestination, is steadily thought-provoking, often bewildering, and occasionally infuriating. But for science fiction buffs, it invites – and likely rewards – multiple viewings.

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