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I enjoyed the realization that the voice over is John's direction to Jane, and not just the generic instruction for new time agents. Particularly the "your first mission is as important as your last" bit in the opening.
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Nov 28, 2014 09:30
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The copy of Stranger in a Strange Land was a nice nod.
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Nov 28, 2014 12:19
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I didn't realise there was a thread for this. For an Australian film, this was surprisingly good and I remember being pretty surprised to find out that it was filmed in the Docklands.Esposito posted:I don't think this is the case, because Jane/John's timeline stops when they kill themselves in the laundromat. But by doing so, they also stop a future attack that will kill tens of thousands (or whatever the number is), continue the loop which will result in them living their lives, and provide the agency with their subject of study that results in all their advances. Ending spoilers This is what I got from the ending, Robertson giving John clues to the origins of the Fizzle bomber and an active time travel device as well as all his talk about how special John/Jane was. At the end of the movie: 1) John prevents the bombing in this timeline by killing his future self 2) When time travel is discovered a few years later, the Bureau is new and inexperienced and so doesn't have the resources or knowledge to prevent disasters 3) John, prompted by Robertson who gave him a still active time travel device, prevents all the disasters that the Bureau misses but he ultimately goes crazy from all the time jumps and becomes the Fizzle bomber to prevent bigger disasters from happening 4) The Bureau grows as a result of John's work as both an agent and the Fizzle bomber until we're back to square 1 to close the loop.
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Nov 28, 2014 18:27
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So, what I took away from the ending is that Robertson was one of the founders of the time travel agency and when they invented the machine they had no idea how to use it properly, so Robertson goes back in time and guides the creation of a predestination paradox as a learning scenario for the agency to study so they can learn to time travel better? Loved the film, but the overall reason for the paradox being created in the first place is a little lost on me.
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Nov 30, 2014 23:26
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Great movie. I read the (12ish pages) story afterwards, and it's really sparse. They did a great job filling in the emotional part of the movie, probably due in large part to Snooks and Hawke. The only thing I wasn't sure about was in the ending: Who is performs the big New York bombings? At the end, neither old Bartender or young Bartender have done them yet. The way the film is set up about predestination, old Bartender is always shot before he performs them. So did Robertson perform the final bombing as a way to motivate/train the Bartender/Bureau, essentially framing him? Unless the newspaper clippings were faked. It kind of begs the question of what the Bureau can accomplish, since they can't change any news, they just have to make sure the news the have happens. Esposito posted:I think this is covered when they make their first jump together, from the bar. They stand facing each other with the violin case between them and they look to be the same height. Esposito posted:I don't think this is the case, because Jane/John's timeline stops when they kill themselves in the laundromat. But by doing so, they also stop a future attack that will kill tens of thousands (or whatever the number is), continue the loop which will result in them living their lives, and provide the agency with their subject of study that results in all their advances.
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Dec 1, 2014 04:44
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rapeface posted:Great movie. I read the (12ish pages) story afterwards, and it's really sparse. They did a great job filling in the emotional part of the movie, probably due in large part to Snooks and Hawke. Yeah no kidding, the fatalism here is hard to get my head around and I think that's why John/Jane are so important to the Bureau. Unless old bartender was actually mental and making poo poo up they actually did change things as shown via the news clippings where they saved 3k+ lives, i.e. there are separate timelines. If it were a closed loop then where are the news articles about saved lives coming from? All the other time travelling was just predestined stuff to create the bomber I guess. The NY attack is weird, would have been cool if old bartender said he saved 13k+ people to hint that that's the first time he changes the future but I guess it was Robertson because he's a jerk.
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Dec 1, 2014 05:54
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Are we sure the bombings ever actually took place? All we have is clippings that could have been faked by Robertson Absolutely loved the film by the way, and recommend everyone to see it. Sarah Snooks' performance was incredible, as others have said. Daduzi fucked around with this message at 08:07 on Dec 7, 2014 |
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Dec 5, 2014 21:31
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Esroc posted:So, what I took away from the ending is that Robertson was one of the founders of the time travel agency and when they invented the machine they had no idea how to use it properly, so Robertson goes back in time and guides the creation of a predestination paradox as a learning scenario for the agency to study so they can learn to time travel better? Well that's the paradox, you can't create a time loop. A time loop's causation is totally self-contained. It just exists. It has no external cause, by definition. John/The Fizzle Bomber says as much at the end: something to the effect of "that's the paradox, you can live it but you can't doctor it." They got incredibly lucky with the a functional hermaphrodite; I don't think that's possible without some really really exceptionally weird things going on in conception and development. In my understanding of genetics and fetal development, to have two functioning sets of sex organs, one male and one female, Jane must be a chimera: a person with two different sets of DNA. She must be the result of two embryos that fused at the very beginning of the development process. The female twin was dominant but some tissues, including a functioning set of testes, were tissue from the male twin. Without the right hormones they didn't work until the doctors activated them by removing the functioning female sex organs and activating the testes with hormone therapy and surgery. What a terrible doctor to perform the first stage of sex reassignment without the patient's knowledge or consent! Probably the most emotional moment of the film was Jane practicing "my name is Jane" in a male voice while silently weeping. But then again, they didn't really get "lucky" since the time loop is causally complete; Jane had to have this extraordinary set of features because she had to. I love how they get the viewer to suspect that Jane is the Fizzle Bomber shortly after her first introduction, and then just kind of forget about it for 30 minutes. Of course, Jane is the Fizzle Bomber, but there's about 15-20 years of subjective time between him and the Fizzle Bomber. (For convenience I refer to him as Jane until he gets his face blown off.) The only thing that doesn't make sense is John's explanation about the Fizzle Bomber with "he keeps changing the date." It should be obvious to the TBR that the Fizzle Bomber has a time machine. We don't really see enough to know whether they've jumped on that lead. The conceit that they let people take a time machine with them when they retire is a little hard to swallow. That that is the hard thing to swallow in a film with so many amazing conceits is a compliment though. Does anyone have any idea what's going on with the Spacecorp thing? In 1974 they talk about it as if space travel is routine. Should we read it as a space-age scam, a dummy corporation banking on the space craze to recruit people for a nebulous assignment? Or should we see this as evidence for an alternate timeline where technology has progressed more rapidly as a result of meddling? Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Dec 7, 2014 |
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Dec 7, 2014 04:20
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Arglebargle III posted:Does anyone have any idea what's going on with the Spacecorp thing? In 1974 they talk about it as if space travel is routine. Should we read it as a space-age scam, a dummy corporation banking on the space craze to recruit people for a nebulous assignment? Or should we see this as evidence for an alternate timeline where technology has progressed more rapidly as a result of meddling? I think it's just that the short story was written in 1958, Heinlein incorrectly predicted that the far-flung year of 1974 would have routine space travel, time-travel would be discovered in the '80s, etc. and the moviemakers decided to do an extremely faithful adaptation that included the original dates. It's like if Star Trek Into Darkness had mentioned the Eugenics Wars of the 1990s.
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Dec 7, 2014 05:12
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I don't get it. I mean I got all the plot twists and spotted them all early on but since the plot twists are literally loving impossible I don't get it.
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Dec 7, 2014 05:54
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It's a paradox. The time loop causes itself; so the paradox is that it can't have external causes. It is possible but not cause-able.
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Dec 7, 2014 10:57
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England Sucks posted:I don't get it. It's the whole point of the title of the original short story, "All You Zombies" which is name dropped with the original quote on the film. The protagonist knows that they caused themself. It's all the other normal people that are the mystery to them. Jane is a closed loop.
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Dec 21, 2014 07:59
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bewilderment posted:It's the whole point of the title of the original short story, "All You Zombies" which is name dropped with the original quote on the film. The protagonist knows that they caused themself. It's all the other normal people that are the mystery to them. Jane is a closed loop. That is actually kind of beautifull. I never read the book, but I like this 'message'.
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Dec 21, 2014 18:00
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Loved it. I was confused about the ending as well though. It seems based on the closed loop that despite rage killing TFB, John goes on to become him (goes crazy from time jumps and/or sees the light and realizes that blowing up a few people to save a lot is justified). I think there's a critical piece of dialog is that just before John shoots TFB, TFB says "Check out what we're going to do tomorrow!" -- Unless the answer is "We're going to blow up 10,000 peole to prevent a nuclear holocaust leaving millions dead", I think he aimed to PREVENT the NY bomb which was actually somebody else (and up until then the time bureau just assumed it was TFB). But that doesn't quite add up either, because if it's someone else, then it's not part of the closed loop and should be preventable by the other ten time agents. Or would it still be part of the closed loop, and John shooting TFB ends up making it un-preventable somehow?
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Dec 27, 2014 22:00
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England Sucks posted:I don't get it. This is exactly how I feel. How can Jane/John even loving exist? The loop, story, and everything was great except for that glaring loving paradox. Jane is the product of John loving Jane, the child is then left at the orphanage to become Jane who becomes...Basically He/She sprung up out of nothing. That's the part I can't get past.
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Dec 28, 2014 12:05
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LordNad posted:This is exactly how I feel. How can Jane/John even loving exist? The loop, story, and everything was great except for that glaring loving paradox. Jane is the product of John loving Jane, the child is then left at the orphanage to become Jane who becomes...Basically He/She sprung up out of nothing. That's the part I can't get past. It's a paradox, it doesn't begin or end, it simply is. It's like how Kyle Reese is the father in Terminator. Who was the original father of the first John Connor before he sent Kyle Reese back in time? The answer is that the father has always been Reese and will always be Reese.
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Dec 28, 2014 18:10
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WarLocke posted:It's a paradox, it doesn't begin or end, it simply is. But see I get that. At one point, there was a father. A person literally sprang up out of nowhere. The father, mother, and loving kid are the same person.
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Dec 28, 2014 19:40
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LordNad posted:But see I get that. At one point, there was a father. A person literally sprang up out of nowhere. The father, mother, and loving kid are the same person. I haven't seen this movie yet, but if it's based on the short story I think it is then there never was a father. The father, mother, and kid always were the same person. That's why it's called a closed-loop paradox. It's not like there was some 'former' timeline and the time-travel shenanigans resulted in a new one (or even that they put a 'crimp' in the original timeline with this loop) a closed-loop paradox by definition has always/will always exist, there is no beginning or 'starting it' or 'how things were before it'. It literally is a fixed point in space-time and that's where the 'predestination' bit comes in - he's his own father and mother because he was already his own father and mother and it can't be changed because it already happened.
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Dec 28, 2014 19:52
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WarLocke posted:I haven't seen this movie yet, but if it's based on the short story I think it is then there never was a father. The father, mother, and kid always were the same person. That's why it's called a closed-loop paradox. Fair enough. My brain still rebels against the idea but your explanation is solid.
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Dec 28, 2014 19:57
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LordNad posted:Fair enough. My brain still rebels against the idea but your explanation is solid. Yeah that's why paradoxes are fun, we're 'trained' to think of time as linear but a time paradox doesn't work within the 'rules' we grew up with and so it feels wrong and alien (which it is, because it's a paradox).
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Dec 28, 2014 20:10
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SolidSnakesBandana posted:Just finished watching this. My biggest criticism is I'm confused how anyone can mistake Sarah Snook with short hair for a man. Well, that point was kind of addressed in the film itself. When she enters the bar, one of the other people in it says something like 'God, look at this freak' , which made it seem like she didn't look right to the people in the movie either. Having said that, she did look different enough for me to not realise she was the same actor who played the same character in the earlier scenes, so it was convincing in that sense. BOAT SHOWBOAT posted:A lot of this was shot at my university (University of Melbourne) and in and around other Melbourne landmarks. That was actually one of the first things I realised about it, because the first scene has the character walk down the lobby of 333 Collins Street (http://www.free-things-to-do-melbourne.com/333-collins-street.html), where I worked for a few years. What gave me a bit of a laugh about that is that the door he goes into off to the side to go down to the basement for the next scene is actually a toilet in real life
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Dec 29, 2014 13:58
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Hoopy Frood posted:Well, that point was kind of addressed in the film itself. When she enters the bar, one of the other people in it says something like 'God, look at this freak' , which made it seem like she didn't look right to the people in the movie either. Having said that, she did look different enough for me to not realise she was the same actor who played the same character in the earlier scenes, so it was convincing in that sense. When I first saw Snook in the bar, my first thought was that she looked like a lesbian. It wasn't until a bit later that I realized I was supposed to be seeing this character as a man. I have known way uglier women with deeper voices than that, I just wasn't convinced.
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Dec 29, 2014 20:31
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I just got the Blu-ray from JB Hi-Fi. Ticket price is $27 but they have a storewide 20%-off sale on all Blu-rays. That ends today (I think), so anyone who wants the movie should jump on it now.
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Dec 31, 2014 04:18
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Watched this and had a question that maybe someone who read the story could answer- There's a scene where John fights the bomber and gets his rear end whooped, but then in the laundromat scene it looks like future John has had a stroke? Is that proof that the bomb was placed by someone else???
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Jan 11, 2015 02:55
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Watched this tonight based on the iTunes Plot Summary because it sounded interesting and WOW! the iTunes plot summary is amazingly spoilery. "Based on the short story "All You Zombies" by Robert A. Heinelin, Predestination chronicles the life of a Temporal Agent (Ethan Hawke) sent on an intricate series of time-travel journeys designed to ensure the continuation of his law enforcement career. Now, on his final assignment, the Agent must recruit his younger self while pursuing the one criminal that has eluded him throughout time." I realized part way through that I had either read or read about the story it is based on, but still enjoyed it and thought it was well done. But if I hadn't already read the story, that description pretty much lays out every part of the plot from start to end in two sentences.
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Jan 13, 2015 04:22
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Yeah that's some bullshit. I wouldn't want to know that going into the movie.
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Jan 14, 2015 00:42
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Excellent film. Like any good movie it left me wanting to discuss it afterwards. I'm surprised this thread isn't bigger. Also, it seems like Ethan Hawke is in everything right now. Busy guy.
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Jan 24, 2015 17:27
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Ethan Hawke was on the Nerdist podcast recently. Ethan and the directors wanted the tag line for the movie to be: Go gently caress yourself. The movie was great, and if you can handle the Nerdist podcast, give it a listen. He had some good stories and there was some discussion on Boyhood as well.
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Jan 25, 2015 01:32
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I finally caught this movie, and I think it is one of the most existentially lonely things I've ever seen. An infinite triumph of lonely duty over love forever and ever. The idea that the only person in the entire universe who could ever love you is yourself, and even then, not for long... drat.
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Jan 25, 2015 01:36
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Anyone know where to get this streaming or on demand? It's not on Netflix streaming (although Snowpiercer is for some reason, much worse movie)
Arglebargle III fucked around with this message at 00:55 on Jan 27, 2015 |
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Jan 27, 2015 00:43
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For future inquiries of this nature, I recommend using http://www.canistream.it/ . To save you the trouble though, I'll tell you that you cannot stream this currently. That website can send you an e-mail when you can stream it though. It's a cool site.
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Jan 27, 2015 00:46
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Arglebargle III posted:Anyone know where to get this streaming or on demand? It's not on Netflix streaming (although Snowpiercer is for some reason, much worse movie) I got it on Google Play, but I think it is on iTunes as well.
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Jan 30, 2015 02:59
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Just watched this and I felt like the concept was interesting, but the presentation was a total miss. Just the way everything was handled and revealed was incredibly hokey and ruined the movie for me. The final reveal at the end seemed so needless. I couldn't tell if they were trying to put the pieces together for the densest person in the world, or if they just wanted to do a little recap of the twist that they had already been put on display for the last half hour or what.
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Feb 11, 2015 06:36
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It really is about as good an adaptation of Heinlein's story that one could hope to see. It's a shame this has such a limited marketing budget, because it has almost no visibility here. Even when I knew it would be in theaters, it lasted for such a short time that I missed it until yesterday (watched it on Blu-ray). My take on what was going on with the Fizzle Bomber is that he started out with good intentions, but made too many jumps, leading to the psychosis that made him go crazy to the point that the no longer cared about the people who were dying. And quite possibly was only doing it as a cry for attention from himself. It would fit with the ending of the story in which he becomes so solipsistic that he can make everyone else disappear by taking a headache powder, but misses herself terribly. Arglebargle III posted:
They weren't supposed to be able to take it with them, though. At least not in a working state. The Bartender's machine fails to 'decommission' properly, and he doesn't really bother about it at the time. Presumably the idea is that you get to retire to whenever you want. I'd expect that decommissioning will send the machine back without you. Except that doesn't quite fit with how the FB describes it - he says 'you didn't bother to report that' which implies that the Time Corps wouldn't be aware of it going missing, so it would seem they're allowed to keep a non-working machine.
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Feb 11, 2015 21:14
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Daduzi posted:Are we sure the bombings ever actually took place? All we have is clippings that could have been faked by Robertson I agree with your spoiled take. To elaborate: The whole movie is a closed loop. The "big" Fizzle bomber bombing never took place at all. Robertson alludes to this when he says how even though they didn't catch the Fizzle bomber he still improved the agency and Hawke questions if he even wants to catch him. It's also Robertson's clue that leads Hawke to catch his future self. Robertson would be in a position to know what took place in the laundromat since it's in his past. God, every loving character in this movie is the same person. I love it. Hell I half expected Robertson to be, by the end of the movie.  Great, great loving movie. mr. unhsib fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Feb 18, 2015 |
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Feb 16, 2015 09:50
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This film was vaguely on my radar but after watching it all I can think is "how the gently caress is this not a massive sleeper hit??" I mean hey, I loved Looper, but this blows Looper out of the water. Just a loving great flick, holy poo poo.
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Feb 18, 2015 08:29
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If anyone wants to read the short story, it's here: http://cla.calpoly.edu/~lcall/303/heinlein_all_you_zombies.pdf It's pretty close to the movie, just without the fizzle bomber subplot.
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Feb 18, 2015 19:59
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victorious posted:Actually the more I think about it, the more this movie stands out to me as the movie Looper SHOULD have been. This was my exact reaction too. Going in I was worried it was going to be over-complicated, but it had the perfect balance of complex/simple. I also had no idea how major Susan Snook's role was in the movie. I had to laugh at the twist at the end because it reminded me of the original Saw - and having it told through a voice-over on a tape recorder didn't help.
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Feb 19, 2015 05:05
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mr. unhsib posted:
To me the twist was that this wasn't the case.
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Feb 19, 2015 09:47
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I suspected that there was more than just a single looping timeline when John finally meets Fizzle in the laundromat. The moment where Fizzle says "Want to know what we're gonna do tomorrow?" made John realize that when Fizzle was in his place, he let himself get talked into not killing his future self. There were also some subtle things towards the end that made me suspect that our John ends up being Robertson and Jane ends up being Fizzle. Robertson states "We all depend on you" when John was about to snatch the baby, which implied to me that he meant that every iteration of himself could only exist if John played his part and gave the baby to the orphanage. When we get some flashbacks at the end, I remember there being an extra line when John tells his earlier self that he has to leave Jane at the park, when he's sat on the bench with the gun pointed at him, that was never spoken originally. That itself made me think that these flashbacks, with their subtle changes, were actually Jane's experiences as she goes through the process of being John and doing all his missions. Triangle did a similar thing where there were multiple looping timelines interacting with each other.
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Feb 19, 2015 10:06
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