Predestination is one of those science-fiction films that is all about one single, shocking twist. As such, anyone writing about it must decide whether or not to reveal the twist. Here, I’ve opted on a compromise of sorts. I won’t write down exactly what happens, but I’ll leave enough clues that readers should probably be able to make reasonable guesses. The first such giveaway is that it’s based on a 1958 short story by Robert Heinlein called All You Zombies. I haven’t read this story myself but those who have are certain to know what the twist I’m talking about it. But then I didn’t need to have read that story to see the twist coming a mile away anyway.

Even the usual kind of summary that I write here gives away too much, so suffice to say that it starts with  some kind of special agent working for some mysterious bureau. He’s injured in an explosion and needs to undergo facial reconstruction, at which we see that Ethan Hawke is playing him.Then he pops up in a bar and spends a lot of time hearing a customer tell the story of his life. Naturally that story is a pretty amazing one and that it is not a coincidence why the agent is there in that bar at that time. With a title like Predestination, it’s no great spoiler to say that time travel and questions of the inevitability of fate are involved.

I’d guessed the big twist pretty early on, around the time that the bar scene starts actually, so I have to admit that this negatively affected my enjoyment of the film. The rest of the movie only served to confirm that it exactly follows the path I’d predicted it would take. I checked with my wife afterwards and she said that she wasn’t expecting it so it could just be because of my greater exposure to science-fiction stories. I may not have read All You Zombies but I’ve read similar stuff before, for example, Michael Swanwick’s Scherzo with Tyrannosaur.

The obviousness of the plot aside, I also have qualms about the fact that this film rests entirely on the strength of its single twist and has nothing else to offer apart from it. I wish, for example, that it had spent more time on how the head of the bureau, Mr. Robertson, had seemingly orchestrated all of the events in the film, or shown at least one or two of the other agents that are implied to exist, or . A good science-fiction story shouldn’t rely on a single idea, it should exercise sufficient imagination to present a succession of ideas as well as variations on them. As it is, the film is such a one-trick pony that it feels like it only has enough material to fill an episode of a show like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits.

To pad this out to feature film length, the pacing is execrably slow. Just look at how much time is spent on the back-and-forth when the Hawke as the bartender tries to convince the customer to tell his story. There are also events that seem extraneous as they serve no narrative purpose, for example, Jane attempting to enroll in Mr. Robertson’s program a second time. Plus there is all that excessive signposting, such as singing the “I’m My Own Grandpa” line twice. The slow pacing doesn’t just drag the film down, it also gives the audience too much time to guess at what is really going on and therefore obviates any sense surprise or shock when the inevitable revelations hit.

Finally, while the whole plot-line concerning the Fizzle Bomber is apparently original to this film and likely added to generate more excitement, I’m surprised that they kept so much from the original story intact. This explains the weird dates, like how the story starts in the 1940s and time travel is invented in the 1990s. It’s also why there are anachronisms like Jane applying to be essentially a comfort woman for astronauts. Yeah, Heinlein was a weird guy but there’s no reason why we need to keep this. These are all stuff that should have thrown away and updated into a more modern form in a film adaptation. It’s okay to say that this is set in the near future instead of keeping the original 1940s starting date.

That’s why as much as I like the idea of making films out of short stories from the Golden Age of science-fiction, I think this is merely a mediocre effort. It’s just too bad that there aren’t really any science-fiction television shows any longer than can be used to tell these kinds of stories.