Predestination – A Movie I Didn’t Finish
It kinda seems stupid to write an article about a movie I never got around to finishing, but sometimes I feel like things aren’t worth finishing. After all, sometimes things are just so bad that you can’t finish them. However, Predestination, a movie I watched recently, I turned it off because I was bored.
Okay, I should probably explain why I started watching the movie first. This was on Netflix, and Netflix shows a short preview of a movie before you play it, and it also has a short synopsis. The synopsis stated that the movie I was about to watch was about some time travelers who had to stop a massive bomb from going off to preserve time. Or something like that. Except it’s not. Well, it is, but the whole mad bomber thing is kinda just something to draw you in.
Instead, what I got, after a very brief action thing at the beginning and some initial intrigue, I got this long, ongoing story of someone’s life, the life of this random stranger popping into a bar where the time traveler is currently undercover. And they talk for a long, long time. In fact, this random person (okay, sure, they turn out not to be random later, but still) is very, very open and just airs out all their dirty laundry. Just because this random bartender asks them about their life.
I did however look up the ending, because it’s unlikely that I’ll ever go back and watch the movie. And it turns out everyone is the same person. The whole story ends up with someone being stuck in a perpetual loop, and the protagonist being manipulated in some sort of experiment to see if one could change their own future, or whether everything was predetermined.
Thing is, I did enjoy this story. But it wasn’t what I was looking for. Not in the slightest. I was told I’d be watching a movie about a time traveler trying to stop a terrorist. And the idea that the time traveler and the bomber being the same person is genuinely an interesting idea. But we spent so long talking about the story of Jane becoming John that I forgot what the movie was supposed to be about. If I wanted to watch the story of someone rather unwillingly transitioning from female to male, then what I saw in Predestination was a very good take on it, and the emotions and everything did feel raw and real. That’s not what I was looking for though, and it took up a significant chunk of the movie. John was talking about his transition from Jane to John for a pretty long time, at least 40 minutes.
In fact, while I watched, I paused the movie to see how much movie time had passed and how much time was left. When I hit the pause timer, I was at 45 minutes and had about 1 hour 30 left. Assuming you take off 5 minutes for the credits, we were halfway through the movie and had barely actually done much investigation into the bomber. Really, this pacing was the biggest turn-off for me. A movie’s pacing is there to make sure that your viewers don’t get bored, and that’s kinda what happened to me. I get it, this transition and backstory for John/Jane is very important to the story, but it’s not nearly-half-the-movie’s-runtime important. Even if it IS well-acted and well-written.
Will I go back to watch the rest of Predestination? Probably not. I got bored. I don’t go back to things I get bored of. And, at the same time, I kinda felt somewhat cheated. A heartbreaking story of loss and forced change into someone you hate isn’t what I tuned in for. Sure, the story is excellent but it’s kinda deceiving.
Eh, time travel is messy anyway. There’s a reason why I think we should try and avoid it.