Just as an aside, if you used the quote function instead of this thing you do, it’d be so much easier to track back to the post you’re quoting to get additional context.
Fwiw, I didn’t take Irishman’s post to suggest it was being distributed as an Oscar contender, but it was being distributed (for a variety of non Oscar reasons) to those types of people who are eligible to vote in the Oscars. That is, industry insiders.
The movie will be shown at the Cleveland Cinematheque on March 12 and 15, FYI for anyone in the area. I hope to see it.
It’s available on DVD or Blu-Ray via Netflix or Redbox, if you want to see it at home. I saw it and liked it. I can’t remember the original story enough to tell you how faithful it was, though.
…back in 2004. It’s on most of the streaming services for those of us in 2015. See you next time-loop. 
I still prefer to watch movies on DVD/Blu-Ray. Plus most of the new titles are available first on DVD/Blu-Ray and only much later via a streaming service. And also there’s no streaming service that has every title available, while the first sale doctrine means that a single service can make any disc available.
Oh, I know - we still have a huge disc library and get a few things on physical form. I’m not sure that any major releases aren’t simultaneous on disc and PPV streaming, and it’s not common for a streaming release to be exclusive to one service - at all, or for very long. And any streaming box handles all the majors anyway.
It took me a while, but I’m a complete convert. Not even that drive to RedBox. 
(And no more 50% problem rates with 5% availability from Netflix…)
Damn! “most of” doesn’t seem to include my Netflix subscription. Do I have to subscribe to something else now?
Netflix is by far the worst service to have if you want newly released movies. Their disc service for new releases slowed to ridiculous crawl a few years back, and it takes between six months and never for them to show up on the streaming service.
By paying $3-5 to Vudu, Amazon Video or MGo, you can watch any released movie in full HD/5.1 without ever leaving your house. No subscription required.
Thanks!
But the problem with the streaming services is, as I said, that there’s no one service that has everything. So you have to figure out which streaming service has the newly released movie you want. I still use Netflix to watch the new releases but if you don’t want to pay for the DVD-by-mail service, Redbox is a pretty good deal. A buck (or maybe a buck fifty for Blu-Ray) gets you a newly released title for a day. Much better than three to five bucks for those streaming services. But then I’m a cheapskate.
Well, you got me there. I confess, it’s really time-consuming to type a search name into Roku’s cross-provider feature and see not only which of the four or five providers has it, but who has the best price.
(That is, frankly, faster than searching using most provider tools, which are often down some rabbit hole of “helpfully suggesting fifty other movies you probably don’t want to watch.”)
RedBox is fine if you have box near you and you’re diligent about checkout and return and you’re willing to put up with the usual drawbacks of rental discs. And don’t mind the time and gas to get there and back, on their schedule more than yours.
I’m pretty cheap, too. But a buck or two to sit on my couch and choose what I want to watch at that moment, in perfect HD with no hassles of technical problems or availability… worth it, IMHO. One of the reasons we finally dumped NF disc service (besides the enormous delays on new releases) was that it was like video Viagra - you had to plan ahead for what you wanted to watch, and then had little choice about it. Which is fine, when there weren’t any alternatives.
The alternative now is Netflix streaming, which for $8 brings you a massive library of stuff; add HuluPlus, which adds in almost all regular TV programs on a one-day delay, for another $7 - oh, and has about 90% of the freakin’ Criterion catalog to boot - and then pick and choose a little from the PPV providers, with all the advantages above, for however much those new-new releases are worth to you. We’re big movie watchers and I think the Vudu bill almost reaches $20 some months.
But to each his own. I can see a preference for NF/RB.
It’s almost sad that discussion of the movie gave way to discussion of how to watch it, but it really does seem to have very little marketing behind it.
It is about as fine an adaptation as one could hope for, and even the extra material mostly feels right — my only complaint is that because there is no text to look back at for it, the extra material ends up being vague in a way the original parts aren’t. It’s still an interesting source of discussion, though.
What to make of FB saying what he’s going to do ‘tomorrow’? Are there multiple timelines, or just one, and the event is already planned and he knows from the future that it was successful (a predestined action, as it were). I almost wonder if he had a deadman switch rigged for his final event.
It’s playing now in Bangkok. The wife and I watched it last weekend and loved it. A lot. Never read the short story.
That info is not correct, at least not for Thailand. Your post is from last September, but the film just opened in Thailand a week or two ago.
I have no idea what the entry in the release date webpage of the IMDb that claims that Predestination opened on 16 October 2014 actually means. Here’s a guess, and it’s no more than a guess. Although the release date webpage is supposed to distinguish between one-time showings in film festivals and regular film openings in ordinary movie theaters, perhaps they made a mistake here. I note that the World Film Festival of Bangkok ran from 17 October to 24 October in 2014. Perhaps the makers of Predestination couldn’t get it into that film festival and decided that they would do a one-time showing of it the night before the festival. They rented a theater and got some publicity for it among the people who would be attending the festival. Then when setting up the release date webpage, someone didn’t know how to explain the showing, since it wasn’t a regular release but wasn’t quite a showing at a film festival either. They just put down that it showed on that day in Thailand.
Yes, it could have been for a film festival. I never go to those in Thailand. I’ve given up on them. They just can’t seem to get it right. They’ll have it spread over multiple venues far apart and often switch around sites for specific movies at little or no notice.
And I still remember one festival screening where they showed an Almodovar but didn’t realize it was in Spanish and so didn’t bother to look for a copy with English subtitles. That’s about par for the course here.
Just saw it tonight, and mostly liked it.
[spoiler]Hawke and Snook were both very good. I never believed her as a man, though - too feminine at all times.
The Fizzle Bomb plotline was a bit of strain, as extrapolated from the short story, but gave the movie a tragic ending. I thought Younger Hawke might shoot himself in the laundromat to keep from ever turning into Older Hawke/Fizzle Bomber (I guessed early on that he was the same person), but instead he shot Older Hawke, and thus (virtually) ensured that he would eventually go mad and become the Fizzle Bomber.
Why would the neonatal nurse not say anything when she saw Hawke standing in a trenchcoat outside the nursery, just before he snatched the infant Jane? Had she been bribed?
For awhile I thought Richardson might also be Jane/John, but that didn’t happen.
Good set design and SFX; high production values.
Nice in-joke with a “Dr. Heinlein” (check the credits) examining John when he reapplied for Space Corp. Striking resemblance to the author, although I couldn’t find a pic of him through Google Images.
Some good trivia about the movie on IMDB: Predestination (2014) - Trivia - IMDb
[/spoiler]
I saw it and enjoyed it very much, but one thing confused me:
[Spoiler] Of course we know that time travel isn’t real, and movies either go under the “12 Monkeys” theory where the past cannot be changed. It was and will always be. Others go on the “Back to the Future” theory where the past can be changed resulting in alternate universes. This movie relies on the first.
That’s the only way the predestination paradox works, otherwise Ethan Hawke’s character never exists in the first place because he was never around to alter the “original” timeline. But if we are going on the “12 Monkeys” theory, the movie is inconsistent when it comes to finding the Fizzle Bomber.
The time travel agency is sending these agents back to find and stop the Fizzle Bomber. He is obviously altering the past because they cannot pinpoint which day in March, 1975 that he kills 11,000 New Yorkers because it is said that he keeps changing the day because of their efforts. Also when Hawke meets his older self, the older self states that he must detonate the bomb because he has seen worse things happen when the bomb is not detonated (as evidenced by the newspaper clippings).
So, it does seem like there are both original timelines and various alternate timelines because of the actions of time travelers. If this is true, there never should have been a predestination paradox. Am I missing something? [/spoiler]
There is no paradox. It only looks like one because we think of time as linear. We see events happening like this:
A B C D E F G
Events lead from one to the next, and you can’t go back to alter things. But there is no reason to think you need to start at the beginning.
Hawke’s (and Snook’s) character exist in a closed time loop. Events for him/her are like this:
E F G A B C D
Hawke can’t have stopped shooting himself because he never did. Just like you can’t go back and change your past.
Looking at this, I’m not sure I’m making sense 
It’s perfectly clear in my own head.
So why did the date of the fizzle bomber attack keep changing? Why was there a different universe (a least temporarily) where:
Older Hawke didn’t carry out the attacks, but saw worse things happening and calculated that he must carry out the attacks to prevent these worse things? Both imply that he actually did change the past, but then traveled back to the 1970s to set off the fizzle bomb. I also got the impression that the time police kept stopping him but he simply conducted the attacks on different dates (in each iteration) to thwart their attempts
IOW, can the past be changed as in Back to the Future, or is it immutable as in 12 Monkeys?