Review of Predestination (2014) by Clarisesamuels — 11 Mar 2015

This film seeks to explore, reductio ad absurdum, the difficulties imposed on the time-travel genre by a phenomenon generally known as “the grandfather paradox.” This is the problem that arises if one goes back into time and commits an action that prevents one’s own birth, such as killing one’s own grandfather, but it can also be more liberally applied to any action committed after traveling back into time that may affect the initial action that was taken to go back into time. So, if I travel back before my birth and kill my grandfather before my mother is conceived, I won’t be born; therefore I was not present to make the decision to go back into time to kill my grandfather. Not being there to commit that crime means my mother was born, after all, which means I was born and the loop starts all over again.

Many scientists, novelists, and filmmakers have sought to work around and somehow resolve the grandfather paradox. The only explanations that make sense are the ones that claim we can only back into time to a parallel universe, where we change history in the parallel universe, but the universe we live in stays the same. However, the Spierig Brothers, who wrote and directed the film, have decided to go to Hades in a handbasket and to fly in the face of everyone whoever had a logical thought about cause and effect. Their hero, the bartender played by Ethan Hawke, works for a company that sends him into the past at regular intervals to prevent heinous crimes. They can only make short time jumps, because long jumps damage the mind and cause insanity. Hawke’s character has already made one jump too many, and has taken an unauthorized jump outside the allotted zone, so his mind is warped by time, so to speak, and he is trying to find out the identity of a man called the Fizzle Bomber, who in 1975 kills 10,000 people in New York City with one bomb.

I would yell spoiler alert, but the spoiler is so bizarre, that as one critic put it, you’re left at the end yelling, WTF??? So here’s the spoiler—the bartender/time agent is awaiting the entrance of someone he knows is coming in for a drink, because it’s John, his younger self. John is a transsexual, who was once a girl named Jane who was a baby left on the doorstep of an orphanage. She was born with weird internal wiring, both male and female, but was only aware of her female parts. Then Jane met a stranger one night, who was John traveling in time, lost her virginity, and had the baby alone because John suddenly left her sitting forever on a park bench. After a C-section, complications demanded that the female parts be taken out and the male parts extended. Jane became John. And John comes in the bar telling Ethan Hawke (who is John’s older self looking much different because of facial reconstruction after almost being burned to death) about how the mysterious male left him to have a baby that was later stolen from the hospital. That same baby was delivered to the orphanage, and was named Jane. Yes, that’s right, John, Jane, the baby and the bartender are all the same person, traveling through time, meeting up with each other, and having unorthodox relationships with themselves.

I know you’re asking why didn’t Jane recognize herself after she became John as her own lover who deserted her? There she was, clearly looking at John in the mirror after her sex conversion, but he/she is sitting in the bar telling Ethan Hawke she never saw John again after he left her on the park bench. Her transsexual conversion turned her into John, and she didn’t notice? She apparently had no recollection of what time-traveling John, her future self and past lover, looked like. Maybe memory loss occurs after gender conversion. Anyway, Ethan Hawke’s bartender keeps reliving this scenario because he’s continually going back into time to find the Fizzle Bomber. Finally, he retires from the firm to the year 1975 in NYC, just before the Fizzle Bomber pulls off his major coup, and he finds the Fizzle Bomber, looking very aged and very crazy, sitting in a laundry mat. And guess who it is?

I think the Spierig Brothers are poking fun at the grandfather paradox. At one point, Ethan Hawke’s character bounds down the stairs to the bar’s basement, and he sings a line from a rather tuneless song: “I’m my own grandfather...” That was a clue. Instead of being his own grandfather, he’s actually his own mother, father, and grandfather. Who spawned the first version of Ethan Hawke’s character? No one knows. They’re stuck in an endless loop like “a snake eating its own tail.”.

Ethan Hawke does a remarkable job at making this senseless scenario interesting, and Sarah Snook is equally brilliant at playing both Jane and John. And all those physicists out there who are working hard to resolve the grandfather paradox can clearly stick it in their ear, courtesy of the Spierig Brothers.