Review of Predestination (2013) by Walter M — 18 Jan 2015

"Predestination" starts with a man preventing a bomb from exploding, saving many lives, but at the cost of suffering serious burns to most of his body. When he is taken back to his own time, there is surgery performed to heal him and give him a new face and voice that make him resemble Ethan Hawke. As a time agent, he is obsessed with stopping that same bomber, specifically an explosion that will kill more than 10,000 people in New York City in 1975. In 1970, he works undercover at a bar where he encounters a young man, a writer, who he challenges to tell him a story he has not heard before. So, the writer begins with when he was a little girl...

When people say a science fiction movie is ambitious, usually they mean a movie that has one good idea and cost many millions of dollars to make. What they forget is how to make a truly mind-bending science fiction movie like "Predestination" which is a heady story about gender, identity and fate and with more than its fair share of twists and turns. Granted, one of those twists may not exactly make a whole lot of sense but that just means you can never underestimate the power of denial. What you can also not underestimate here is exactly how good Sarah Snook's dual performance is.