A time-travel thriller that leaves a lot to be desired

Director: Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig

Cast: Ethan Hawke, Sarah Snook

Rating: 15

Running time: 96 mins

Release date: 20th February, 2015

It’s testament to the saturation of progressivist politics in Hollywood that the first 40 odd minutes of the new Sci-fi thriller, PREDESTINATION – based on Robert Heinlein’s short story, ‘all you zombies’ – act as a thinly-veiled attack on all things male. This should come as no surprise. The Spierig brothers (more Atwood than Heinlein) have risen to prominence on the back of a politically charged, ‘capitalism is evil’ debut, Daybreakers (2009), a film that showed promise, but like Predestination, suffers greatly as a story due to bloated moralising.

Without giving too much away, Predestination is about a time agent who, on his final mission, is pursuing a serial bomber through time. Its novelty lies in its use of the predestination time paradox, which again, if known in any detail, will prove to be a major spoiler.

From the outset, the viewer is bombarded by the general ineptitude of the film’s male characters. Ethan Hawke’s character, ‘The Bartender’ is caught in a closed time loop, and seen to unsucessfully thwart an important event on several occasions. Males are even defeatist about their existence and are portrayed as morally suspect. Hawke consoles Sarah Snook’s character, ‘The Unmarried Mother’, that being male isn’t a death sentence. However, it’s the mixed signals of the scene where The Unmarried Mother excels in a space programme, that really turns up the misandry.

She is tested and ‘objectified’ – fulfilling the selection criteria – only to trip up on being intersexed. It’s an odd series of events: why would rewarding traits that are seen to be masculine be a good thing when the astronauts already in space require obedient maidens? Are the Spierig brothers looking to essentialise maleness (e.g. reason/numerical orientation, physically minded, assertiveness etc.) in an attempt to make a crude point that only men are of value? The men in the film appear to lack any of these traits. The assessors, for instance, are lecherous nay-sayers, reminiscent of the futuristic, authoritarian panels in Terry Gilliam’s films. For all their progressivism, the Spierigs do not touch upon the subjective experience of intersexuality, using it more as a springboard to make wider, confused points about gender.

The second half of the film tackles the meat of Heinlein’s story: the difficult to follow time paradox loops, connecting the relationships between the central characters. This is where the film should have been fascinating. However, the lazy plotting is compounded by a scatter-gun treatment of the events leading up to the big twist in the final third. The build-up borrows from the Saw school of filmmaking; with dramatic music rhythmically accompanying an accelerating montage (except at least Saw made sense). Who is who and what time line we’re at is, by now, anyone’s guess.

There isn’t a single element of Predestination that rises above mediocrity. Much of the praise directed at the film – most notably, Snook’s performance – is stricken by ideological bias (ironically, the most notable thing about the novelty of an intersexed character is this default lauding, external to the film).­­ Snooks is competent, even though she comes across as a Saturday night live character, played straight and downbeat. ­

The cinematography is claustrophobic and gaudy, with the film dangerously drifting into the dire orange and grey aesthetics of sci-fi TV-movies. It’s a paltry effort, but due to its overt, yet unintentionally ambiguous political subtexts, the Spierigs will be back, pedalling their half-baked agenda in another uneven mess.

Verdict

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