Predestination (2014)

Directed by Michael and Peter Spierig.

A fortnight ago I saw the trailer for Predestination which includes as shot of Ethan Hawke saying, “I know where I come from – but where did all you zombies come from?”  I knew that line; it was from a science fiction story I read fifty-odd years ago.  I couldn’t place the source – actually Robert Heinlein’s “—All You Zombies—” (1959) – but I knew what the line meant and so I approached the film like a man entering a maze equipped with a rough map, delighted by the twists and switchbacks but always knowing where it was going.  Lucky me.

After a prologue in which a man apparently trying to defuse a bomb is mysteriously attacked and horribly burned, the story begins with another man walking into a bar.  He talks with the barman (Ethan Hawke), and after a little verbal sparring he identifies himself as the writer of a magazine column, The Unmarried Mother.  He demands that the barman tell him a joke, and the barman complies

“Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”  “The rooster!”

The Unmarried Mother begins to tell the story of his life, beginning with the declaration that he was born a girl, found abandoned on the doorstep of an orphanage in 1945.  The story is told in voice-over flashbacks with occasional returns to the bar.  The baby, Jane, grows into a remarkably intelligent girl who is also a gifted brawler.  A mysterious stranger, Mr Townsend (Noah Taylor) appears from time to time to monitor her progress, and when Jane (now played by Sarah Snook) reaches adulthood, Taylor recruits her as a potential member of a space mission.  Although she is obviously the outstanding candidate, she is expelled from the course after brawling with another candidate.  Adrift in the world, she starts attending college and one evening meets a man who seems to understand her with uncanny insight.  After the briefest of affairs, he disappears suddenly, leaving her pregnant.  She has the baby by C-section, and in the process the doctors find that she has both male and female genitalia.  They are forced to remove her uterus and ovaries, and thereupon operate to make her into a man.  While (s)he is recovering, someone walks into the hospital and kidnaps her baby.

When The Unmarried Mother finishes his story by confirming that he is, in fact, Jane, the barman takes him down to the cellar and shows him a violin case which is actually a time machine.  An essentially linear, if intricate plot suddenly turns into a Möbius strip in four dimensions, if you know what I mean.

There are several references in the early part of the film to an urban bomber known as the Fizzle Bomber, who is responsible for several large explosions which have taken thousands of lives.  The barman is actually a Temporal Agent, travelling in time with the task of preventing crimes before they happen.  Under the direction of his superior, Mr Taylor, he is on the track of the Fizzle Bomber, and this is somehow connected to the Mother..  Like the Ghost of Christmas Past, he takes the Mother back to visit his earlier life, and the plot loops begin to appear, reloop and tighten.

The audience has to be on the ball for the rest of the movie.  “If that happened, then he is really… but that means she has become…  but if he kills him, what happens to the previous fifty years?”  But as well as working through an expanded account of the issues detailed in Heinlein’s original story, in Predestination the Spierig brothers have added the Fizzle Bomber sub-plot in which Temporal Agents seek to prevent atrocious crimes, bringing the film’s title into question.

Time travel is more fantasy than science fiction.  The time machines are so much hocus-pocus – in Predestination they’re carried about in a violin case like a gangster with a tommy-gun.  The fantasy may be partly about the future, but much more about the not-so-secret wish to change the past and the warning beloved of sci-fi authors that changing the past could lead to unforeseen changes in the present, mostly catastrophic.  The Sliding Doors concept of alternate, parallel time-streams has been around in sic-fi for a long time.  It’s there in one of the Planet of the Apes movies, and Philip K. Dick’s classic novel “The Man in the High Castle” proposes a world in which the Germans and Japanese won World War II.  The idea of going back in time to avoid a car accident or kill Hitler underlies a different sub-genre – the Terminator concept, if you will – and is closely related to the “precognition of crime” thriller Minority Report, also based on a Dick story.

The barman wears a ring in the shape of the Worm Ouroboros and is annoyed when a drunk in the bar insists on playing “I’m my own grandfather” on the jukebox.  These and the chicken joke are hints at the structure of the story, partly a logic puzzle and partly a Terminator-style thriller.  Characters skip about in time in a manner reminiscent the reality-hopping in Christopher Nolan’s Inception (2010) and eventually the mysteries of the Mother and the bomber meet in a manner both emotionally satisfying and, for the logically-minded, quite unhinging.

With lesser actors Predestination would still be an intriguing puzzle, but Ethan Hawke is now at the height of his profession and Sarah Snook gives an arresting performance in her first major film role.  Their lengthy dialogue scenes in the early part of the movie feel partly like a fencing match, partly like a courtship

This is the third movie by the Spierig twins, showing a remarkable confidence and sure handling of an inherently difficult story line.  The fact that identical twins made this movie seems to have an ineluctable significance, if only one could grasp it.