Time catches up with us all.

Predestination

(2014)

(SPOILERS) I’m not the biggest fan of predestination paradox time travel yarns. I’m even less a fan of time travel tales requiring their protagonists to undertake key acts in order to fulfil the causal loop of a bootstrap paradox. Both require some pretty hefty pre-designated rules that don’t readily apply themselves to scrutiny or internal plausibility (breaking down to, “Because the writer says it’s so”). Since Predestination immerses itself in both these narrative conceits then, I really ought to have come out less than impressed. However, its eccentric mystery mostly flies for the sheer verve with which the Spierig brothers embrace the predestination theme of Robert A Heinlein’s 1958 short story All You Zombies; this isn’t just a case of a Terminator-style twist to top things off. Each event in their intricate screenplay rests against each successive event so as to infuse a Russian doll of paradoxes. More than that, though, Predestination pulls off a (for the most part) touching character study taking in themes of alienation, loneliness and determinism.

Indeed, it’s the opening 50 minutes, a sad tale told in 1970 by John (Sarah Snook) to Ethan Hawke’s time-travelling barman from 1985 that really seals the movie, rather than the convoluted series of reveals that comprise the last half. Hawke is employed by the Temporal Agency, on the trail of the Fizzle Bomber. We are told that, in a more elaborate version of Minority Report, “We prevent crime before it happens”, but so far he has been unable to stop the Bomber killing 11,000 people in New York in 1975. This is as prelude, however. It’s evident John will be the primary suspect as Hawke wouldn’t be indulging his tale for so long as a mere red herring. As a result, the clues leading to the actual reveals and twists (the burnt face of Hawke’s former identity, the unseen suitor of Jane, John’s former identity) are slightly undermined by the filmmakers’ tendency to elaboration; by the time we are granted a montage sequence in the final minutes “explaining” what has long been evidenced, it suggests a lack of faith in the audience.

It’s fairly commendable to have a told tale occupy the bulk of a movie the way this does, though. One might argue it’s all about the pay off but, as elaborate as that is in its preposterous employment of time-travel theory, it’s the emotional sway of Snook’s phenomenally assured performance that raises the Spierigs’ movie another level. John is abandoned outside an orphanage as a baby Jane in 1945. She dreams of becoming an astronaut but is rejected by the Space Corps (the picture’s unheralded alt-history is one of its most winning aspects) when her intersex status is discovered. After an affair with a man who suddenly ups and leaves her, she gives birth to a child who is stolen from the nursery. On top of that, the caesarean operation leads to the removal of Jane’s ovaries and uterus, giving an enthusiastic doctor the chance to initiate an unsanctioned creation of a male urinary tract; Jane had no choice but to submit to a full gender reassignment. As John, he takes up writing true confession articles for a glossy magazine as The Unmarried Mother.

Even (or especially, depending on how one views the second half’s conceits) leaving out the crucial fateful interventions that dictate Jane/John’s life, Snook makes this narrated account utterly compelling. So much so, one is willing to forgive the slight leaps in motivation (it’s never so much portrayed as told that she hates the mysterious lover enough to kill him). Snook’s John has a touch of the DiCaprio in appearance, and she navigates Jane and John with such instinctively refined modulation that Hawke is really only required to show up and take notes.

So the second half of the picture reveals how all this falls into place. Hawke is, of course, John after facial reconstructive surgery. He follows a careful series of instructions to ensure his own life follows its predestined course. It’s John who is Jane’s mysterious lover (taken to 1963 to “murder” the lover, it is love at first sight when he meets Jane; forget about retroactive abortions, this takes the biscuit with its proto-narcissistic feats), it’s Hawke who snatches baby Jane from the nursery and delivers her to 1945. And it’s Hawke who pops to 1975 (“unauthorised”) to ensure John makes it to 1985 to have the surgery on his extensive burns. It’s also an older Hawke who turns out to be the Fizzle Bomber, his illicit jumps fostering the onset of psychosis and dementia.

The problem with all this is that it requires a rigorous rulebook to be even vaguely tenable. The paradox, of course, isn’t. It’s a loop with no prescribed beginning, bootstrap style, but taken to such an absurdist extreme that it’s nigh-on irresistible. Since such theories make no sense, Heinlein/the Spierigs go for broke with it: “The snake that eats its own tale, forever and ever”.

More than that, while there are significant sections of the picture where one or other of the protagonists is led in his/her course of action (either by John/Hawke or Noah Taylor’s Temporal Agency boss Mr Robertson), there are others that require this predestined loop to be tackled head-on. It appears the only way the rules here work is for everything to be preordained, and so John/Jane, and by extension the Temporal Agency have no say in what happens; they are cogs in a machine that must play out in the same cyclic manner. No one can actually change its course (as such, one must assume the newspaper headlines we see attesting to its mutability are either manufactured to manipulate or confabulations of the mind), so any fanciful notion of free will over the events is an illusion.

If there’s a problem with this approach (assuming you’re willing to run with it in the first place), it’s that it really needs to be challenged at some point. Time Crimes (curiously, both films utilised bandaged protagonists as a means of concealing the central twist) irritates because it rather ludicrously has its protagonist choose halfway through to undertake the acts inflicted upon him during the first half of the picture; the very awareness of his involvement would change the minutiae of those events, unless he became a “zombie” compelled by the timeline to enact his experiences just so.

The Spierigs also fail to address this concern directly. They make a fist of it with John not recognising himself as the lover who spurned Jane, when he first sees himself in the mirror (part of him could only see the bastard who ruined her life), but the actual relationship with her requires more than falling head over heels to avoid questions of “Why does he go through with hurting herself?” and “Wouldn’t he want to tell her his true identity?” It probably wouldn’t have taken much to cover this; simply having Hawke attempt to shoot himself in the head but failing, after killing his older self would have addressed the point. But without it, the Spierigs must rely only on the philosophy of predestination rather than exploring the detail of how they see it working.

This isn’t a deal breaker, though, as underlying all this (much more so due to Snook than Hawke’s reliable but unremarkable showing) is a desperate, hopeless sense of the strictures of fate and yet, simultaneously, our own responsibility for our actions (in the context of the story Jane/John, cruelly, has “no one but her/himself to blame”). The All You Zombies title itself appears to comment on our automatic, conditioned responses to lives we only think we have a say in.

I enjoyed the Spierig’s previous (also Hawke starring) Daybreakers, although it didn’t wow me. That was relatively low budget, but this cost a fraction of that picture and looks great, thanks to Ben Nott’s cinematography and Matthew Putland’s design work. That the brothers are willing to take structural risks (the front-ended tale told) makes the formally much more familiar second half a slight comedown, but there’s still a satisfying exactness to following through with the premise. It just can’t quite pay off the emotional wallop of Snook confronting herself by having Hawke confront himself. If she isn’t on the road to the next big thing as a result of Predestination, she deserves to be.

Abandon selective targeting. Shoot everything.

28 Weeks Later (2007) (SPOILERS) The first five minutes of 28 Weeks Later are far and away the best part of this sequel, offering in quick succession a devastating moral quandary and a waking nightmare, immortalised on the screen. After that, while significantly more polished, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo reveals his concept to be altogether inferior to Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s, falling back on the crutches of gore, nihilism, and disengaging and limiting shifts of focus between characters in whom one has little investment in the first place.

The Bible never said anything about amphetamines.

The Color of Money (1986) (SPOILERS) I tend to think it’s evident when Scorsese isn’t truly exercised by material. He can still invest every ounce of the technical acumen at his fingertips, and the results can dazzle on that level, but you don’t really feel the filmmaker in the film. Which, for one of his pictures to truly carry a wallop, you need to do. We’ve seen quite a few in such deficit in recent years, most often teaming with Leo. The Color of Money , however, is the first where it was out-and-out evident the subject matter wasn’t Marty’s bag. He needed it, desperately, to come off, but in the manner a tradesman who wants to keep getting jobs. This sequel to The Hustler doesn’t linger in the mind, however good it may be, moment by moment.

Doctors make the worst patients.

Coma (1978) (SPOILERS) Michael Crichton’s sophomore big-screen feature, and by some distance his best. Perhaps it’s simply that this a milieu known to him, or perhaps it’s that it’s very much aligned to the there-and-now and present, but Coma , despite the occasional lapse in this adaptation of colleague Robin Cook’s novel, is an effective, creepy, resonant thriller and then some. Crichton knows his subject, and it shows – the picture is confident and verisimilitudinous in a way none of his other directorial efforts are – and his low-key – some might say clinical – approach pays dividends. You might also call it prescient, but that would be to suggest its subject matter wasn’t immediately relevant then too.

I said I had no family. I didn’t say I had an empty apartment.

The Apartment (1960) (SPOILERS) Billy Wilder’s romcom delivered the genre that rare Best Picture Oscar winner. Albeit, The Apartment amounts to a rather grim (now) PG-rated scenario, one rife with adultery, attempted suicide, prostitution of the soul and subjective thereof of the body. And yet, it’s also, finally, rather sweet, so salving the darker passages and evidencing the director’s expertly judged balancing act. Time Out ’s Tom Milne suggested the ending was a cop out (“ boy forgives girl and all’s well ”). But really, what other ending did the audience or central characters deserve?

Your desecration of reality will not go unpunished.

2021-22 Best-of, Worst-of and Everything Else Besides The movies might be the most visible example of attempts to cling onto cultural remnants as the previous societal template clatters down the drain. It takes something people really want – unlike a Bond movie where he kicks the can – to suggest the model of yesteryear, one where a billion-dollar grosser was like sneezing. You can argue Spider-Man: No Way Home is replete with agendas of one sort or another, and that’s undoubtedly the case (that’s Hollywood), but crowding out any such extraneous elements (and they often are) is simply a consummate crowd-pleaser that taps into tangible nostalgia through its multiverse take. Of course, nostalgia for a mere seven years ago, for something you didn’t like anyway, is a symptom of how fraught these times have become.

Captain, he who walks in fire will burn his feet.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) (SPOILERS) Ray Harryhausen returns to the kind of unadulterated fantasy material that made Jason and the Argonauts such a success – swords & stop motion, if you like. In between, there were a couple of less successful efforts, HG Wells adaptation First Men in the Moon and The Valley of the Gwangi (which I considered the best thing ever as a kid: dinosaur walks into a cowboy movie). Harryhausen’s special-effects supremacy – in a for-hire capacity – had also been consummately eclipsed by Raquel Welch’s fur bikini in One Million Years B.C . The Golden Voyage of Sinbad follows the expected Dynamation template – blank-slate hero, memorable creatures, McGuffin quest – but in its considerable favour, it also boasts a villainous performance by nobody-at-the-time, on-the-cusp-of-greatness Tom Baker.

Listen to the goddamn qualified scientists!

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Archimedes would split himself with envy.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) (SPOILERS) Generally, this seems to be the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad outing that gets the short straw in the appreciation stakes. Which is rather unfair. True, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger lacks Tom Baker and his rich brown voice personifying evil incarnate – although Margaret Whiting more than holds her own in the wickedness stakes – and the structure follows the Harryhausen template perhaps over scrupulously (Beverly Cross previously collaborated with the stop-motion auteur on Jason and the Argonauts , and would again subsequently with Clash of the Titans ). But the storytelling is swift and sprightly, and the animation itself scores, achieving a degree of interaction frequently more proficient than its more lavishly praised peer group.

You just threw a donut in the hot zone!

Den of Thieves (2018) (SPOILERS) I'd heard this was a shameless Heat rip-off, and the presence of Gerard Butler seemed to confirm it would be passable-at-best B-heist hokum, so maybe it was just middling expectations, even having heard how enthused certain pockets of the Internet were, but Den of Thieves is a surprisingly very satisfying entry in the genre. I can't even fault it for attempting to Keyser Soze the whole shebang at the last moment – add a head in a box and you have three 1995 classics in one movie – even if that particular conceit doesn’t quite come together.

You have a very angry family, sir.

Eternals (2021) (SPOILERS) It would be overstating the case to suggest Eternals is a pleasant surprise, but given the adverse harbingers surrounding it, it’s a much more serviceable – if bloated – and thematically intriguing picture than I’d expected. The signature motifs of director and honestly-not-billionaire’s-progeny Chloé Zhao are present, mostly amounting to attempts at Malick-lite gauzy natural light and naturalism at odds with the rigidly unnatural material. There’s woke to spare too, since this is something of a Kevin Feige Phase Four flagship, one that rather floundered, showcasing his designs for a nu-MCU. Nevertheless, Eternals manages to maintain interest despite some very variable performances, effects, and the usual retreat into standard tropes, come the final big showdown.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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