Predestination (2014) is a title that uniquely appeals to a Catholic film reviewer.  Please note that I am referring solely to the word and not the movie.  As we shall see with the film, it defies explanation.  I went into the movie thinking that it might shed some light on ideas that have been extensively argued in the Christian world.  Around the time of the Protestant Reformation, there were many offshoots of Christianity that believed in the idea that everything we did was according to God’s design.  This goes against Catholicism’s ideas about free will, which makes Faith more of a conscious choice rather than a matter of being in the right place at the right time, to put it simply.  Being in the right place at the right time, more than oddly enough, constitutes a theme for today’s review of Predestination.  You will not hear any talk of its theological merit.  Instead, you will read about a movie that is probably best spoiled than seen.

Gosh, where to begin with Predestination?  That question has added weight when you consider that the plot is non-linear and the story deals with time travel.  With those factors in mind, I will do my best to describe it to you.  You see, there is what I believe is a government agency called the Temporal Bureau.  Its agents are tasked with preventing major crimes before they occur.  The main one they are trying to stop is a figure known as the Fizzle Bomber, who in 1975 in New York City will set off a detonation in downtown Manhattan that will kill roughly 11,000 people.  This appears about to happen with a shadowy figure carrying a briefcase into the basement of a building.  As he does something that looks like it might be setting up a bomb, he gets into a shootout with another unknown assailant.  In the process, the person doing the placing of devices suffers an extreme burn to the face.  The attacker slides what appears to be a violin case to the victim, which turns out to be a time travel machine.  This person is Agent Doe (Ethan Hawke), who undergoes major reconstruction on his face in order to get back to finding the Fizzle Bomber.  Because he has apparently been at this a while, and jumping from year to year takes a physical toll on people, the powers-that-be inform him that this will be his last mission.  This apparently means landing in New York City in 1970 and working as a bartender.  While doing so, at a certain day and time he seems to be expecting, in walks John (Sarah Snook).  The two begin to get to know one another, and John eventually claims to have the craziest story one could ever hear.  Willing to bet a full whiskey bottle on this assertion, Agent Doe sits while John talks about how he had been born a woman.  John also comes into the world as an orphan.  At five (Olivia Sprague), she learns early on that she is different than the rest of the children at the orphanage.  She fights as well as the boys, but is smarter than them, too.  By the time she turns ten (Monique Heath), she realizes that her uncouth behavior is not likely to get her adopted.  As she matriculates through school, her aptitude earns the attention of Mr. Robertson (Noah Taylor), who offers Jane the opportunity to work for SpaceCorp.  She believes that she will mean getting to be an astronaut, though her propensity for brawling eventually gets her kicked out, despite the last instance being self-defense.  Mr. Robertson tells her that he will try to get her re-instated, but this never materializes.  Instead, she takes up a job as a domestic servant while taking college courses at night.  It is while in school that she meets and falls in love with a man for the first time.  It is a short romance, and ends abruptly with him telling her he must leave.  She never sees him again, but it is enough for her to become pregnant.  Shortly after giving birth, her doctors tell her that during her cesarean section, they noticed that she had male and female internal and reproductive organs.  The pregnancy had damaged the female parts, but with the male parts fully functional, they make the decision to reassign her gender.  There was no mention of any religious beliefs here, just for the record.  Anyway, this is how Jane becomes John.  Once the tale is complete, Agent Doe tells John that the Temporal Bureau has the ability to help John get even with the person that left Jane.  Hence, Agent Doe takes John back to the moment when Jane meets this person.  I had trouble following the film up to this point.  It is here that it goes complete off the deep end.  When John encounters Joe, it becomes evident that he had been the one to copulate with her.  You read that correctly.  Meanwhile, Agent Doe attempts to prevent the 1975 bombing as at the beginning of the film, but unsuccessfully.  Mr. Robertson intervenes to get Agent Doe back on course.  This means taking Jane’s baby back to the orphanage at an earlier time, then being the one later to remind John to leave Jane.  Here we get another twist: that Agent Doe is an older version of John.  Right.  With this, John is sent to 1985 to begin his path to become Agent Doe, while the elder one is sent to 1975 for the last time.  He is supposed to be retired or “decommissioned” as it is referred to by the Bureau, but his violin case claims to have experienced an error.  What this does is make him review the evidence he had collected on the Fizzle Bomber.  It leads him to a laundromat and an even older Agent Doe.  The eldest of this person claims that his actions save lives.  Yet, a horrified Agent Doe shoots and kills his aged self to hopefully avoid become a mass murderer.  The end.

If you could not follow that synopsis of Predestination, who could blame you?  I mean, the notion that Jane gave birth to himself after getting pregnant by himself is enough of a mind-bender.  There are a few aspects of this strange and twisted plot, though, that I can analyze from a Catholic perspective.  What I will skirt (no pun intended), at least somewhat, is the topic of gender reassignment.  Besides, it is not the point of the film.  Instead, it is more about destiny and whether that can be changed.  It should be noted, though, that Jane did not seem happy with the idea of becoming John.  There is a word for people born with two sets of organs, which is “intersex,” but this situation is usually dealt with at birth.  Instead, I would like to focus on the joy Jane felt in becoming a mother, even going by the pen name “The Unmarried Mother” (also how she is credited in the film) to write articles for similar women in a magazine.  To have not only the father of her(?) child abandon her, and then the baby is taken in the middle of the night, are formative experiences for her/him.  It is why John goes with Agent Doe, John’s original intent being to murder the person who had messed up Jane’s life.  The sad part, I would argue as a Catholic, is that it is the doctors who performed the surgery on her are more the ones to blame for her misery.  Had Jane been given the option, it seems evident that she would have chosen to remain a woman.  The Church has no problem with intersex peoples provided the choice is made.  It also teaches that they should be respected before the operation, and after, no matter the choice.  Once this is done, that person can take full part in the life and Sacraments of the Church.  This is the purpose of all people, a notion that is prevalent in the film.  Jane states that is what she wants out of life, and believes she finally attains it with John.  She should be credited, despite the premarital sex (with himself. . . .), for maintaining her chastity until she finds it.  We should all be so determined.

The only determination I had while viewing Predestination was in figuring out what was going on and hoping it would not get any weirder.  I cannot say I accomplished either of those goals.  If the point is to show that one can avoid the eponymous state, then I guess that happened?  But then there is a subplot about dementia and who knows if Agent Doe still goes on the be the Fizzle Bomber?  I would just skip this one entirely.