RETRO MOVIE REVIEW — PREDESTINATION (2014)

To the best of my knowledge, there have been three English-language big-screen adaptations of Robert A. Heinlein’s work, but only one—Predestination—attempts to be as faithful as possible, given the original short story, published in 1959 in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (Figure 2), is only 12 pages long. That story, “—All You Zombies—“, was written, so it is said, in one day in 1958. Two other movies, Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters (which has had several versions made) were, respectively barely based on the source material and somewhat faithful, depending. There was also a Japanese version of The Door Into Summer (2021), but it seemed to have little in common with the novel except time travel. (Destination Moon was written by Heinlein, reputedly from Starship Galileo, but I don’t remember them as being very similar.) Also, Tim Minear, who’s written lots of TV SF (X-Files, etc.), wrote a screenplay for The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which was supposedly going to be made by Bryan Singer or Tim Burton or some other well-known director of big-screen SF, but it never got made.

Because the original short story was, as I say, about 12 pages long, one would assume it might need some stretching to fill an hour and a half or two hours of screen time. You would be correct in that assumption; an unrelated “serial bomber” subplot was added to round out the time but, as I will show, not only doesn’t work as written, but has only one thing in common with the story.

Since the movie is ten years old, I won’t shy away from spoilers, with the assumption that you have seen it already—if you haven’t, go stream it somewhere and come back to this review, okay? The plot is a not-terribly-complex time-travel story (Heinlein tended to use time travel in a fairly simple way, not only in this, but in The Door Into Summer and, briefly in, for example, Farnham’s Freehold and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls as well as the latter’s predecessor, The Number of the Beast.

This is the short story’s plot & timeline, briefly: In 1945, a female baby, Jane, is left anonymously on the doorstep of an orphanage. She isn’t adopted and grows up unwanted and unloved until, in 1963 she (Sarah Snook, Fig. 3) meets a strange man who seduces and impregnates her—then leaves her. The baby is born in 1964 and abducted from the hospital. Jane is told after the birth that she had both male and female reproductive organs and that the female set had to be removed, making her a true male. She becomes “John” and learns to support himself by writing “unwed mother” stories for True Confessions-type magazines at 4 cents/word; after all, he had experience. (The rates now are not a whole lot higher, in case you’re interested; there are fewer of those magazines, but they don’t pay a lot more.)

John stops in at a bar in 1970 and meets an unnamed barkeep (Figure 5) who tells John he (the barkeep) is also a child of and unmarried mother; John then tells his story to the barkeep who, after they have shared a couple of drinks, says he can help John get revenge on the man who “ruined” him and left him alone and pregnant.

The bartender leads John into a back room and takes him to 1963, where he meets Jane—and has the revelation that he is both seducer and seduced as well as the baby and the barkeep. The bartender goes to 1964 and kidnaps the baby, leaving it on the orphanage’s doorstep in 1945.

After the seduction and abandonment, the bartender recruits John into the Temporal Corps, closing the loop. In both story and movie he/she/they say or think “I know where I came from, but where do all you zombies come from?” (“All you zombies” meaning everyone else in the world.)

In the story, all loose ends are tied up—there’s a small subplot about how Jane tried to become a “comfort woman” to the Space Force and, after failing at that, tried to get into the Space Force. Years ago, this was a common idea in SF; all spacers/space rangers/spacemen were actually male, and males can’t go for months without sex. And women were second-class spacers, fit only to fulfill the males’ sexual needs. Which, of course, was horsecrap, but we see even Heinlein—who later wrote some very empowered women—fell into this trap. But we know better now.
In the movie, there’s a larger subplot about a bomber who sets “fizzle” bombs (so called, says a newspaper article about a 1975 bombing in New York that kills 10,000 people, because of the type of bomb used. The word “fizzle” is used once in the story about a bomb used in the “War of 1963.”)

The movie begins with that subplot about the Fizzle Bomber; a person in trenchoat and hat, carrying a briefcase and “violin case,” enters a large room with machinery, and opens the briefcase, which turns into some kind of “bomb container”; while attempting to take the explosive and controls out of a previously placed bomb, he is interrupted by gunshots. He manages to put the explosive into the container but, before he can close it, the timer runs out and the bomb explodes; burning his head and face; he wakes up in a hospital where he seems to have gotten a full face graft. We realize later that this was Ethan Hawke.

The rest of the movie proceeds pretty much as above in the story, but with “Fizzle Bomber” being more prominent in the movie; at the end, we see Ethan Hawke enter a laundromat and confront an older, sloppier version of himself who seems to be permanently crippled in the arm and leg. Bartender Ethan confronts Fizzle Bomber Ethan, telling him he has to pay for the ten thousand dead in New York. Bomber Ethan says that he has saved lots of people, showing newspaper clippings to prove it.

Bartender Ethan shouts “I will never become you!” and shoots Bomber Ethan several times, then the movie ends. Which to me, makes no sense—if this is another loop, then he’s only killing the man he will become, i.e., himself! Maybe I’m missing something, but that whole subplot didn’t change anything in the actual story and, in a sense, invalidates it. But aside from all that, I appreciated that a very large portion of the movie was taken verbatim from  the story.

You can listen to the story through the name link above; you can read the The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress screenplay through that link. I haven’t read it yet, but I will have done so shortly. I’d like to know whether you think it would be a good Heinlein movie. Let me know, please.

If you have anything to say about this column, pro or con, you can comment here or on Facebook, or even by email (stevefah at hotmail dot com). All comments are welcome as long as theyre polite. My opinion is, as always, my own, and doesn’t necessarily reflect the views of Amazing Stories or its owner, editor, publisher or other columnists. See you next time!