Predestination

Name: Predestination
Genre: Action, Sci-Fi, Drama, Mystery, Thriller
Released: January 9, 2015
Duration: 97 min
Rating: 69
Cast: Ethan Hawke, Freya Stafford, Madeleine West, Noah Taylor, Sarah Snook

2015

METASCORE

Generally favorable reviews based on 28 Critic Reviews

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USER SCORE

Generally favorable reviews based on 348 Ratings

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7.9

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7.9	User Score Generally favorable reviews based on 348 Ratings

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Predestination

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Movie Details & Credits

Stage 6 Films | Release Date: January 9, 2015 | R

Starring: Ethan Hawke, Freya Stafford, Madeleine West, Noah Taylor, Sarah Snook

Summary: A Temporal Agent (Ethan Hawke) is sent on an intricate series of time-travel journeys designed to prevent future killers from committing their crimes. Now, on his final assignment, the Agent must stop the one criminal that has eluded him throughout time and prevent a devastating attack in which thousands of lives will be lost.

Director: Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig

Genre(s): Action, Sci-Fi, Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Rating: R

Runtime: 97 min

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Critic Reviews

Martin Tsai

Jan 8, 2015

The Spierig brothers have deftly fashioned an unpredictable thrill ride, and the joy is to fit together all its puzzle pieces. Read full review

David Edelstein

Jan 12, 2015

If time-travel is your thing, you learn to shrug off inconsistencies. You debate chicken-egg questions over drinks or dope and mull over all the permutations. You graph it. You wish like hell you had a time machine. You savor every discombobulating, ludicrous, thrilling second of Predestination. Read full review

The Telegraph Mike McCahill

Feb 19, 2015

Considering these characters are bounced round like pinballs, it’s amazing Hawke and the hitherto unknown Snook gain the emotional traction they do: even those struggling to keep up can’t fail to notice how these two are burnt, figuratively and literally, by their experiences. Read full review

Bill Goodykoontz

Jan 8, 2015

Does it all add up? Maybe, if you follow the letter of narrative law. It's certainly imaginative, with high-minded ideas, but Hawke and Snook are what keep it grounded in truth. Read full review

Staff [Not Credited]

Jan 9, 2015

This intriguing and well-acted gender-bending story occasionally feels like "The Crying Game" meets "Looper." Read full review

Chuck Bowen

Jan 1, 2015

The film effectively underlines the one undertaking that time-travel fantasies can never truly allow: escape from ourselves. Read full review

The Playlist Drew Taylor

Jan 8, 2015

There are so many interesting ideas and concepts that could have been spun from this framework. Instead, it's the work of a bunch of filmmakers who seemingly wanted to offer up a WTF-worthy twist ending and tried to reverse engineer a movie from it. Read full review

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User Reviews

Thegodfatherson

Jan 11, 2015

Predestination is an excellent, well written, masterfully acted and a well paced flick. Ethan Hawke gives an awesome performance. Its a major mind bending trip that is very underrated. A must watch.

4 of 7 users found this helpful43

kevincin

Jan 12, 2015

Itsbest movie that i have seen after inception, i think that only can be make for a genius... awesome...
This is the first movie I think I've ever watched that I wanted to immediately watch again {to see if I had actually made sense of it all!}. Highly recommended.

0 of 9 users found this helpful09

JeffroNC

Mar 7, 2015

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. This movie encapsulates narcissism perfectly. In the form of a mystery sci-fi thriller drama, it brilliantly masks its true intentions. Great suspense, not-so-easy-to-predict plot twists, good (if not great) acting, and well filmed action sequences make this movie both fun to watch and intellectually stimulating. That is a rare combination indeed. I recommend it 100% {Question for others: Is the main guy actually shim too?}… Expand

1 of 3 users found this helpful12

TheQuietGamer

Sep 13, 2021

What a ride! This is the story of a temporal agent who's playing a ridiculously complex game across space and time in order to stop a terrorist attack, all the while raising questions about predetermined fate and inescapable realities. Certain twists and reveals are incredibly obvious, butWhat a ride! This is the story of a temporal agent who's playing a ridiculously complex game across space and time in order to stop a terrorist attack, all the while raising questions about predetermined fate and inescapable realities. Certain twists and reveals are incredibly obvious, but even when you can clearly tell where things are going next where they'll ultimately end up and what the point of it all will have been when it gets there are another matter entirely. That's what will keep you watching.

In fact, the meaning of this has completely eluded me. Is it simply a way of showing off a cool paradox someone came up with? A parable on the ultimate narcissism trip? Maybe it's just about how time travel makes no freaking sense. Whatever the case it gets you thinking in ways I can't elaborate on without spoiling things that need to be seen for yourself. Like how the movie starts off as one thing before turning into something wholly different.

There are people who will find this too outlandish, weird, and complex in a convoluted feeling way (largely because of their own lack of understanding). Yet, those who really enjoy when movies push the science aspect of science-fiction and use them to deliver experiences with genuine depth are sure to find this to be a worthwhile viewing. For me, it stands alongside the likes of Ex Machina and Under the Skin as a particularly rich, compelling, and unique entry in the genre that has stuck and will continue to stick with me for quite some time. The only difference being that it comes from a pair of directors nowhere near as respected as Jonathan Glazer or Alex Garland. Showing that even names typically associated with schlock are more than capable of dropping a gem despite their reputation.

8.3/10… Expand

0 of 2 users found this helpful02

katharris417

Nov 18, 2015

packs a powerful emotional punch thanks to its sensitive treatment of emotive themes and an incredible, multi-layered performance from Sarah Snook.

Check out this movie here http://www.watchfree.to/watch-2a08ee-Predestination-movie-online-free-putlocker.html

1 of 1 users found this helpful10

ClariseSamuels

Mar 11, 2015

This film seeks to explore, reductio ad absurdum, the difficulties imposed on the time-travel genre by a phenomenon generally known as “the grandfather paradox.” This is the problem that arises if one goes back into time and commits an action that prevents one’s own birth, such as killingThis film seeks to explore, reductio ad absurdum, the difficulties imposed on the time-travel genre by a phenomenon generally known as “the grandfather paradox.” This is the problem that arises if one goes back into time and commits an action that prevents one’s own birth, such as killing one’s own grandfather, but it can also be more liberally applied to any action committed after traveling back into time that may affect the initial action that was taken to go back into time. So, if I travel back before my birth and kill my grandfather before my mother is conceived, I won’t be born; therefore I was not present to make the decision to go back into time to kill my grandfather. Not being there to commit that crime means my mother was born, after all, which means I was born and the loop starts all over again.

Many scientists, novelists, and filmmakers have sought to work around and somehow resolve the grandfather paradox. The only explanations that make sense are the ones that claim we can only back into time to a parallel universe, where we change history in the parallel universe, but the universe we live in stays the same. However, the Spierig Brothers, who wrote and directed the film, have decided to go to Hades in a handbasket and to fly in the face of everyone whoever had a logical thought about cause and effect. Their hero, the bartender played by Ethan Hawke, works for a company that sends him into the past at regular intervals to prevent heinous crimes. They can only make short time jumps, because long jumps damage the mind and cause insanity. Hawke’s character has already made one jump too many, and has taken an unauthorized jump outside the allotted zone, so his mind is warped by time, so to speak, and he is trying to find out the identity of a man called the Fizzle Bomber, who in 1975 kills 10,000 people in New York City with one bomb.

I would yell spoiler alert, but the spoiler is so bizarre, that as one critic put it, you’re left at the end yelling, WTF??? So here’s the spoiler—the bartender/time agent is awaiting the entrance of someone he knows is coming in for a drink, because it’s John, his younger self. John is a transsexual, who was once a girl named Jane who was a baby left on the doorstep of an orphanage. She was born with weird internal wiring, both male and female, but was only aware of her female parts. Then Jane met a stranger one night, who was John traveling in time, lost her virginity, and had the baby alone because John suddenly left her sitting forever on a park bench. After a C-section, complications demanded that the female parts be taken out and the male parts extended. Jane became John. And John comes in the bar telling Ethan Hawke (who is John’s older self looking much different because of facial reconstruction after almost being burned to death) about how the mysterious male left him to have a baby that was later stolen from the hospital. That same baby was delivered to the orphanage, and was named Jane. Yes, that’s right, John, Jane, the baby and the bartender are all the same person, traveling through time, meeting up with each other, and having unorthodox relationships with themselves.

I know you’re asking why didn’t Jane recognize herself after she became John as her own lover who deserted her? There she was, clearly looking at John in the mirror after her sex conversion, but he/she is sitting in the bar telling Ethan Hawke she never saw John again after he left her on the park bench. Her transsexual conversion turned her into John, and she didn’t notice? She apparently had no recollection of what time-traveling John, her future self and past lover, looked like. Maybe memory loss occurs after gender conversion. Anyway, Ethan Hawke’s bartender keeps reliving this scenario because he’s continually going back into time to find the Fizzle Bomber. Finally, he retires from the firm to the year 1975 in NYC, just before the Fizzle Bomber pulls off his major coup, and he finds the Fizzle Bomber, looking very aged and very crazy, sitting in a laundry mat. And guess who it is?

I think the Spierig Brothers are poking fun at the grandfather paradox. At one point, Ethan Hawke’s character bounds down the stairs to the bar’s basement, and he sings a line from a rather tuneless song: “I’m my own grandfather...” That was a clue. Instead of being his own grandfather, he’s actually his own mother, father, and grandfather. Who spawned the first version of Ethan Hawke’s character? No one knows. They’re stuck in an endless loop like “a snake eating its own tail.”

Ethan Hawke does a remarkable job at making this senseless scenario interesting, and Sarah Snook is equally brilliant at playing both Jane and John. And all those physicists out there who are working hard to resolve the grandfather paradox can clearly stick it in their ear, courtesy of the Spierig Brothers.… Expand

2 of 5 users found this helpful23

donnydark

Jan 17, 2015

When I bought my movie ticket I though I was seeing a Sci-Fi about time travel. The first scene before the credits showed some action in which something resembling a time machine was present. What followed for the next half of the film was a story told to Hawkes at his job as a bartender,When I bought my movie ticket I though I was seeing a Sci-Fi about time travel. The first scene before the credits showed some action in which something resembling a time machine was present. What followed for the next half of the film was a story told to Hawkes at his job as a bartender, going into the life story of one gender confused woman to apparently set up the story. Unfortunately, I did not see that time travel story due to walking out. With so much time devoted to the set up, this movie (or what I saw of it) more closely resembled one of those night time soaps that my ex wife used to enjoy. Thumbs down for the first half, can't comment on the second.… Expand

0 of 36 users found this helpful036

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