Predestination Trailer Sends Ethan Hawke Traveling Through Time With Guns

By Nick Venable | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

For a spell there, I was allowing myself to believe that maybe the Spierig brothers’ thriller Predestination would either never come out, or had somehow come out in the past via time travel and I never found out about it. But no, it’s definitely coming to a future near you, and the upcoming trailer proves that it may very well be one of the more riveting time travel flicks to come out in the past few years. It’s all in the mechanics, and Predestination is a nice throwback to pre-digital times.

Predestination is based on a short story from Robert Heinlein, and you can hear it referenced in the trailer when one character talks about “all you zombies,” which was the original title. The movie stars Ethan Hawke as a Temporal Agent, someone responsible for using time travel to prevent major crimes from happening. He has a nemesis in his current assignment, the Fizzle Bomber, a mass murderer whose weapon of choice is explosives. The two men have a dangerous past together, and this is one Agent who desperately wants to get his man.

Meanwhile, Hawke’s undercover bartending gig scores him a conversation with an androgynous chap who has an impossible story to tell. Enter Sarah Snook, a bunch of weird headpieces, guns, and a time machine with a combination lock-style interface. And all the while, there’s Noah Taylor and his twiggy mustache watching everything happen.

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“Is this the Inception costume party?”

“You’re a gift given to the world through a predestination paradox.” It doesn’t have quite the same ring as “You’re adopted,” but it’s a pretty strange revelation nonetheless, especially when the fate of thousands of people is at stake.

Michael and Peter Spierig directed 2003’s action horror Undead and 2009’s Daybreakers, both enjoyable movies with an attention to detail that made up for the shortcomings. I have no doubt that Predestination will have the same level of compelling story and genre twists, as anchored by the often intriguing Ethan Hawke. I know how the doozy of the short story goes, so part of this for me will be in seeing how they expand upon the fairly simple (yet extremely complicated) story.

Will he get the Fizzle Bomber, or will he just end up fizzled and bombed himself?

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Also, this can’t be good, can it?

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Unfortunately, Stage 6 Films still hasn’t set a release date for Predestination. Somebody may have to fizzle them to get this thing into theaters.