Time travel stories were all the rage back in the 1950s. Everyone was writing them, and most of them weren’t all that good. Grandmaster of Scifi Robert A. Heinlein decided to write the ultimate time travel story. The result was the poorly named All You Zombies. Predestination is a movie that was based on this 1959 short story.
We start off with two people moving through shadowy places, we don’t get a good look at their faces. One of them is a bomber, one of them is trying to stop the bomber from succeeding. Things go wrong and a time machine needs to be used.
We end up in a bar in 1974. The bartender is a friendly sort. He chats up a man who says he writes a confession column for a magazine, but that isn’t how it used to be. When he was a girl, he had bigger hopes and dreams. He wanted to go to space.
The movie hops from time to time by means of a violin case that opens up some kind of time stream. We move around and watch as the man in the bar is an abandoned baby girl who grows up in a hotile and unpleasant world. Until she meets a kind man and falls in love.
Meanwhile, there is a mad bomber on the loose. Our time traveling bartender recruits the man who used to be a woman to join the Time Cops. Only his first mission is not exactly what he was expecting.
Ok, it’s a time travel story and it has countless paradoxes, just as its source material did, but that doesn’t stop it from being a pretty good movie.
Ethan Hawkes does a great job and so does Sarah Snook. I liked the look and the music and the many little inside jokes about time travel in general and our hero in particular. As with all great science fiction nothing is explained and nothing can be explained.
I liked Predestination.
