Review of Predestination (2014) by Drauchdoes2015 — 04 Apr 2015

Another success in the recent surge of critically acclaimed Australian genre films (The Babadook, Tracks, to name a few), Predestination combines the narrative ball-of-yarn complexity of Looper and The Terminator with the race/gender transgressing themes of Cloud Atlas to make for a fairly distinctive, if a bit slight and thematically-absent time-travel film.

In execution, Predestination has many of the qualities of the films of Christopher Nolan, both good and bad. On one hand, it is stylishly presented and sets its sights, at least somewhat, on the human element behind sci-fi genre-films. On the other hand, it can also feel needlessly complex, silly, and self important (at times).

If you are like me, someone who takes time-travel films as an intricate puzzle meant to be dissected from the first frame that hits the screen, Predestination will unravel, sadly, much sooner than you may hope, considering all the good will and attention to detail paid to making sure the paradoxes don't collide.

Spoilers for this next section. Where Predestination engages you most is in the portion of the story devoted to John/Jane making sure that John/Jane 'exists', simultaneously becoming his own mother, father, daughter, and son, as well as teacher, guardian, and saboteur. The concept checks out upon retrospection in a 'The Terminator" style paradox and is decently surprising, though I saw all of this coming fairly early on.

One of the errs that ails Predestination from the very start is how the expositional dialogue and often blunt explanation of events doesn't make us work hard enough to make completing 'the puzzle' much more than satisfyingly engaging, when it could have been head-scratchingly abstract and required more retrospection, or even repeated viewings, which I don't feel the desire to make.

Predestination's use of transgender dysphoria melodrama as the pivotal driving narrative involves a plotline that is fairly cliched and contians no new insight into what it means to be someone of intersex orientation, though it does provide the quality that currently sets it apart from other time-travel yarns. Where I take up issue with Predestination is how little the mind-boggling story really touches on any important undercurrent of emotion that other sci-fi head-strainers like Looper manage to without losing narrative propulsion.

John's mission is to stop disasters from occurring through the use of time travel. However, the primary job at hand (preventing a massive detonation in New York, killing 10,000+ civilians) is the only one that Predestination sets its sights on. We have no background as to his past accomplishments as a temporal agent, making his character's importance unnecessarily limited in scope, even though we are convinced that he is this savior of mankind.

In a final minute (supposed) mindfuq, John is forced to play the role of both hero and villain, an ambition intended to fry the brain and maybe distort the audience's sense of sympathy, but instead leaves a feeling of indifference, as it comes across solely as a final act of needless complication, an aspect the filmmakers may feel obligatory for time-travel films at this point in the genre. The more complex, the better right? Yes, but only when it coheres on, not only a plot-driven, but also a character-motivation, level. John's final justification for the bombing could be explained due to the debilitating effects of time-travel on the brain, but is executed in a way that feels cursory at best (and frustratingly brief at worst).

Until that unsatisfying denouement, however, the character's motivations feel realistic enough and the narrative is, though a bit obvious at times, quite engaging. Also, something I haven't touched on at all up until this point (but demands to be lauded) is Sarah Snook's fantastic gender-transgressing performance as the young Jane/John. Her display of both male and female characteristics is in equal measure quite remarkable. Though her voice doesn't quite register as completely masculine, there is a scene where she acknowledges that she never quite learned how to speak like a man, an element of self-awareness that recognizes that the only aspects limiting her from portraying a man more realistically are simply because she is, well, a woman.

On the whole, I have gone more in depth for this review than I intended and, without overwhelming with any further text, Predestination is a solid time travel film and makes an even more enticing case for the continued production of genre movies in Australia.