His Movie Review: Predestination (2014)

Why he watched it: read positive review

His rating: 4 out of 5 stars

His review: Time travel is such a tricky premise for a movie. While creating intentional paradoxes (what movie about time travel isn’t about paradoxes?), it can also create unintentional paradoxes (it has to, as it requires leaps in logic). I’ve come to take for granted that even the best time travel movies will have reviews that reference illogical plot holes or incongruities. Setting aside bad time travel movies with lazy writing, I often find that these so-called plot holes are not failures but simply points where the reviewer disagrees with the ‘logic’ of time travel as presented in the movie.

Good time travel movies, though, as with most science fiction movies, are not really about the science of time travel. They aren’t about trying to establish a coherent treatise about time and how it works or doesn’t work. What they are doing is using the ability to move outside of linear time to make us think about actions and consequences, about regret and acceptance, about choice and fate. This film works attempts to show how, through time travel, someone could be their own mother and father. The result is a circularity that lacks beginnings and endings; and thus, causes become effects and effects are causes. What is free choice or fate when the ‘choice’ is created by the action chosen? Where is the beginning of a life when an orphaned baby grows to womanhood, who in giving birth is recreated as a man, who travels back in time to impregnate that woman, whose baby then circulates back again as the orphan?

While these concepts are fascinating to ponder, the beauty of this film is in the telling. Sarah Snook is captivating in her dual gender roles, and Ethan Hawke is smoothly subtle. The pace, direction, and tone all work to effectively carry us along the narrative-within-narrative loops. I’m sure someone will identify plot holes, but they won’t detract from a thoughtful, well-made film worth seeing.