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Heinlein's 'All You Zombies' Now a Sci-Fi Movie Head Trip
HughPickens.com writes: Sara Stewart reports at the NY Post that the new sci-fi movie Predestination, opening January 9, is "loopier than Spielberg's [Minority Report]; its plot twists and turns 'like a snake eating its tail,' one character remarks, until you're not sure whether its developments are even plausible in a fictional universe." It's based on Robert A. Heinlein's science fiction classic All You Zombies, first published in 1959. The story involves a number of paradoxes caused by time travel, further developing themes explored by Heinlein in a previous work, By His Bootstraps, published some 18 years earlier. Predestination's plot concerns the intersection of a time-traveling assassin and an androgynous young writer
I watched this film and and followed the plot fine, but was left feeling very unsatisfied at the end of it.
Most movies involving time travel generally try avoid paradoxes or major plot holes, but with Predistination actively embraces time travel paradoxes, taking them to the extreme.
Maybe someone thought it would make for a "deep" and clever plot, and I had no problem following it, but as I understand it completely, I just felt frustrated with it in the end, because, the science fiction of time travel aside, it's an impossible scenario with no logical resolution.
Anyway, without posting major spoilers I won't say anything more.
Ever read "The House in November", by Keith Laumer? Kind of the same thing, but more story to it. "All You Zombies" was short, sweet, and to the point.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
But then I realized something very simple - his story is at heart all of our stories, only much LESS complicated.
The heart of the question about him is 'where did he come from and why does he exist?"
And the honest truth is we don't know where ANYONE comes from or why ANYTHING exists.
Consider the case of a cyclical universe. Many physicists believe that the multi-verse constantly spews out big bangs, that spew out more big bangs, in an endless cycle.
That model of the universe is at heart identical to his existence, just on a much larger scale.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Starship Troopers was directed by Paul Verhoeven, who likes to push action movies just over the edge of campiness. Action movies that don't fit either the comedy or drama genre fall flat, because frankly, shoot-run-shoot-chase-shoot is tedious. You need to either care deeply about the characters portrayed, or be entertained by laughing at the absurdity of the situation. Verhoeven emphasizes the absurd, which makes scenes like the one where Clancy Brown throws the dagger through Jake Busey's hand during training ( then yells "Medic!") hilarious.
Before I saw it, there was a part of me that wanted Starship Troopers to be a serious movie worthy of the title of Sci Fi, and I remember being initially disappointed that it wasn't. But because he turned it into a "fun" movie, I came to appreciate it as entertainment.
John
If you can't follow the loops you are asleep since it paces them out, and it's consistent.
The Space Corps stuff is a good bit of background scenery to the main story and is the main thing that tells you it's in Heinlein's idea of the 1970s and a good way to tell the viewer that you don't have to worry about events in the film that never happened in the 1970s.
Very good casting, good plot, good acting (some people will hate the accent of one character but I think it fits) - maybe a bit slow in parts but that could be so that the viewer can keep track of the time loops while half asleep or drunk.
So how did I see it? I'm in the future (international date line), and it had a limited release in Australia a few months ago.
But I would remark that the original story All You Zombies, predates it by decades, and as such deserves a bit of credit. The people that wrote Primer, read All you Zombies, or I'd have already eaten my great grand sons' hat.
Moreover, this movie is far more understandable. As such, it can be considered superior, in at least one aspect.
Basically, it depends on how you judge a movie
You are judging all time travel movies by the same rules. I don't that that's appropriate, anymore than judging all cowboy movies by comparing them to Blazing Saddles.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
You seem to have missed the enormous heaping pile of political commentary in Verhoeven's movie. The movie was practically saturated with it. That you didn't recognize it ought to prompt serious self-examination. He had them wearing nazi uniforms for chrissakes.
I was just realizing that when this was published, Heinlein would have been expecting the work to be in the public domain by now..