The music in the first scene sets the tone for what we should settle in to suspect from most movies.
Predestination sets an immediately familiar tone that hooks us into a comfort zone of action/thrillers we've seen time and time again. I was completely game as it is more than you can hope for when it comes to the gloom that typically hangs over January releases. It quickly becomes evident though that this isn't anything we've necessarily come to experience before despite the abundance of time travel movies over the last few years. It becomes clear from the outset this will be a layered time travel story given the literal bang it opens with and then with how it travels back introducing to us the procedural nature of the story. We are immediately hooked and we are taken in, not by the cheap and cheesy special effects that you somewhat expect from a movie like this given the outside influences and circumstances of its genre, release time and even the presence of Ethan Hawke. Rather,
Predestination is not really an action film or special effects bonanza in that much of what one might consider "special effects" seem to be done in camera and in very basic, practical ways that work with the overall style of the piece. This is very much a science fiction film concerning decisions and conversations around those decisions that create motivation, justification, explanation while most importantly developing characters we care about and a sympathy that goes a long way when things begin to really unravel. In essence, I guess you could say this is more of a character study than anything else with the hook being that this character can travel through time and, in many ways, dictate the outcome of their own life depending on what they feel they need in order to create meaning from this existence. There is a lot of interesting stuff going on here and plenty of questions to ponder as things move swiftly along, but I also began to ask myself if this was indeed as entrancing as it seemed or if it was just kind of farcical. I couldn't tell, I'm still not sure if I can, but while I was watching I was certainly fascinated and consistently intrigued, meaning the movie did its job and did it well.
