Predestination

WHY'D I WATCH IT?
Another ChatGPT recommendation, our future AI overlord insists that this is one of the ones I'd like the best.

WHAT'D I THINK? *SPOILERS*

This time we have a real time travel movie and HOLY **** is it a mindbender.

When you think about time travel movies it's often fun to think about weird twists you could incorporate, but usually movies just use one or two of them. This movie feels like it wanted ALL the twists.

The basic premise is that there's a secret government organization tasked with stopping crime before it happens, like in Minority Report, however in this case they are mainly concerned with a prolific bomber called The Fizzle Bomber.

The movie begins with The Agent becoming physically scarred by a partially contained explosion and undergoing reconstructive surgery, we then seem to flash back to him as a barkeep where he picks up a conversation with a rando named "John" who promises the best story he's ever heard in exchange for a bottle and then we proceed to flash back again where in John explains that he was actually born as Jane.

Jane grew up in an orphanage and was nearly recruited into said government organization before she fell in love with a faceless man and became pregnant. Not only did this man mysteriously leave her, but her baby is mysteriously kidnapped as well, and as a result of her giving birth, it is revealed that she is intersex, and she's essentially forced into a "sex change" after which she lives as a man before meeting the barkeep.

The single worst part about this movie is simply the fact that all of this comes across as a flashback within a flashback, all narrated exposition, and this genuinely takes the entire first half of the runtime.

If by the halfway mark you were disappointed that you'd signed up for a time travel thriller and got this meandering life story about some intersex person instead well BELIEVE YOU ME, it does it's absolute best to make up for it.

In response to Jane's wish to kill the love interest that left her with a baby and forced her into a sex change, the Agent offers to help her kill him and introduces her to time travel. He gives her a gun, tells her where he'll be, and in short order "John" finds that they are in fact the love interest and they fall in love with themselves.

ALREADY that's a super hard left-turn in the plot, but it doesn't stop there. So Jane becomes John, John impregnates Jane, Jane gives birth to a baby which the Agent kidnaps and time travels to her orphanage, revealing that Jane's baby is in fact herself.

Which I don't even know that's supposed to work, inbreeding doesn't work like that, does it?

Anyway, John is ultimately lured away by the Agent who somehow convinces him to essentially take up his mantle at the organization which wants him for real this time. This is following dialog which suggests that the Agent will be forced to retire soon, I'm not sure why exactly, I thought the comments about "too many jumps" were about time traveling in succession, but maybe it's just time traveling overall.

Either way, in finally retiring, John chooses to retire to a timeline close to the big bombing target that's been overshadowing the whole movie, presumably in case he finds he has a last-ditch opportunity to stop it. It's revealed that his time travel device doesn't self-decommission as it's intended to, but regardless he goes about his life and seems(?) to notice a pattern of his own behavior which matches with the Fizzle Bomber's known whereabouts prior to the detonation.

This is possibly the biggest plot hole in the movie, if we just had a time and location where we knew where this guy was, why didn't we just time travel there and end it? I'm sure the movie's trying to communicate something different, but I couldn't figure it out even by rewatching this section.

Low and behold, not super surprising after everything else so far, the Agent IS in the fact The Fizzle Bomber, he's apparently continued to use the device and gone time travel drunk, reasoning that by bombing an increasing numbers of civilians he can prevent even deadlier disasters from happening such as a chemical spill and a heist.

The Agent ultimately shoots The Fizzle Bomber, asserting that he'll never become him, BUT THEN we're shown he has sex change scars and I just lost my shit.


You mean to tell me... that Jane, Jane's love interest, Jane's baby, the Agent, and the Fizzle Bomber are ALL the same person?

That means there's literally like 2 whole characters in this movie, Robertson, this guy's "handler", and Jane, every other character is Jane. Jane is Xehanort. What the ****.

So after the botched attempt to stop the explosion at the beginning of the movie, Jane (who we don't know that it's actually Jane at this point), gets facial reconstructive surgery to eventually appear as the Agent.

This means that Jane's life is a closed loop; she both gives birth to herself and kills herself.

So...
Agent John leaves Baby Jane at an orphanage,
Baby Jane becomes Jane,
Jane has sex with John,
John leaves Jane with Agent John to stop Bomber John,
so Jane wants to kill John,
Jane conceives Baby Jane,
Agent John kidnaps Baby Jane,
Jane becomes John,
John meets Agent John,
Agent John brings John to meet Jane,
Bomber John injures John turning them into Agent John,
Agent John becomes Bomber John.

I THINK that's what happens, and my god, was it a skull****.

Even if this movie starts to feel predictable, because some of these twists have some pretty strong foreshadowing, it's STILL weirder than you think it'll get.

This is definitely a movie that begs a rewatch and I'm inclined it'll probably fair a lot better than The Game did, once you know how it ends.

This movie 100% scratched that same sort of itch that Whodunnits give me, where I'm constantly speculating who everyone is and, and similar to the "everyone was the killer!" trope, this movie just winds up being "every character was every character!"

I appreciate that the entire theme of the movie is laser-focused on the idea of predestination, it's implied that Agent John will become Bomber John in more ways than one, but it's never certain and so the open-ending leaves room for a potential happy ending, where Agent John successfully stopped Bomber John and lives out his life in peace, but also the "bad ending", where he continues his time traveling crusade to kill everyone to save themselves.

I definitely like this movie, the theme of predestination also kinda covers it's ass a bit with regards to time travel plot holes because, for example, if Agent John never delivers Jane to the orphanage, then Jane can't eventually become Agent John to deliver herself to the orphanage, so in some way Agent John must do that because it's a prerequisite for his existence.


In Back to the Future we defer to the "Tangent Universe" idea, where timelines can skew along an alternate path, resulting in branching outcomes that can be abandoned or averted. Predestination doesn't do this and consistently maintains that the events are all one continuity, which helps avert the sorts of plotholes of other time travel movies that want to have it both ways, like in Looper.

Either/Or is probably the best way to approach a time travel movie.

I still have questions, like in Donnie Darko, but unlike Donnie Darko, I feel like I have the answers and am just having fun speculating about further what-ifs.

Again, this first half of the movie is a real slog, "My Intersex Life Story" and all that, and I'm relieved that this movie didn't get all social-justicey on me, when it easily could have pulled some real In the Shadow of the Moon type shit, and then I would have just hated it.

Instead it's just a whole lot of exposition for a whole lot of payoff and I can easily see myself wanting to show this movie to someone to see them lose their mind at what happens in it.

That may well be a good enough reason to own it, honestly. I'll have a stronger idea of what to rate it after a rewatch.

Another slamdunk ChatGPT recommendation.


Final Verdict:

[Good]