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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
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"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
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.
FYI: There are no zombies in this movie. (Or, at least, there were none in the original story, and it doesn't look like they randomly added any to the movie.)
It's just straight-up scifi time travel.
Basically, he exists because he exists. Which when you come right down to it, is the same as the rest of us, only his existence is a lot less complicated.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
There was enough base material to work with / expand upon to make a good story without bringing in the "terr'rist" angle. Colour me sad :-(
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
It's not exactly out of character for the short story - the main character works for a time traveling police agency, so a time traveling terrorist would be a viable nemesis. The real question is if it makes sense, and how well it meshes with the rest of the story.
Starship Troopers was always controversial for its martial philosophy, and All You Zombies is wacky. Why not pick one of his more straightforward books?
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
The novel was incredible for the time (that and "Friday" it was called, the one with the intersex assassin?). Spoiler below:
In the novel in the end practically all protagonist are the same persons on different point of the time line, in a very paradoxical way (e.g. , the main protagonist his himself, herself before the sex change, and her own daughter).
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
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True. I would Love to see "Stranger in a Strange land", "I will fear no Evil", or "Friday" turned into a movie
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.
Agreed. Starship Troopers was awful. I LOVED it.
IMO, Primer sets the bar for time-travel movies, even though it's deliberately ambiguous. It seems that really, the only 'next step' is to bring out many more of the complex paradoxes that something like Primer begins to address.
For instance, what would happen (not used, but implied, in Primer) if one put an (unoccupied) running box (IIRC Primer only uses collapsed boxes) inside a running box? My guess is that it would allow for arbitrary backward time travel (with the Primer provisio that it would be a branched universe)..
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That's how it is in the movie and it's done well IMHO. Sarah Snook is awesome in her parts of it.
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 watched the movie... and, to be honest, I had no idea what it was about before I started. But I'm into relativity and that sort of thing so I found it interesting.
I'll try not to give too much away but if you read on you might get some slight spoilers... so read at your own risk.
The gist of it is "Time cop" meets The NSA but less lame. And the premise is that the universe follows the "May worlds" theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...
The film uses Many Worlds to try and resolve the "Boot strap paradox": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... and/or the "Predestination Paradox": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
Now, when you start watching it the movie kind of harms itself in that, it doesn't explain this at all... there are no convenient scientists around to explain possible scientific ways out of what we would generally consider not possible even in science fiction. I think it would have been helped by such a device. It wasn't until after I watched it, saw the ending, and then thought on it for a couple of days that I really understood what they were trying to get across.
***More spoilers, dont read if you don't want them!***
I think that the primary characters in the film were in a "Many worlds" universe and as such I think that the dance you see has been played out infinitely in many other versions of the universe. Furthermore what I think the film suggests is that these universes can interact and that the actors are not just traveling in time, they are also traversing these realities. So the events in the film may be in a closed loop, but that loop was started by the characters arriving from other "Worlds" etc... Perhaps this world existed all along, but the paradox they created collapsed "The past", etc...
The film does not explain this well at all, and I'd not take anyone that wasn't really into hardcore scifi to see this. I barely grasped it and I read the hardest hardcore scfi available every day. As far as film goes this is about as mind bending as it gets. The acting was good... but the device revolving around the main characters gender was very very clunky. I did not like that at all, and it was Rocky Horror picture show silly in its presentation. I'm not sure how else they could have pulled that off, but they should have tried a lot harder.
it is good and really close to the original short story without overextending and destroying the actual idea of the premise. If you like proper old SciFi, this movie is absolutely for you. But don't expect it to be extremely brain-bending if you are a bit familiar with Heinlein's work.
This movie was released in Austrailia, I think. I'd already seen it when a students bought me a burned DVD of it. I teach a Science Fiction literature class and "All You Zombies" is the story we read to introduce time travel. (I know there may better for introducing the topic to a bunch of high school students, but it works well with the other reading selections I use.)
Anyway, I watched it and it is worth watching. The story is mostly all dialogue which makes one think it would make a horrible movie without much action or scenery. Especially since the text is mostly cerebral. However, the movie adds some interesting aspects to the film. In the story, the temporal agent is charged of preventing disaster (terrorists?) and recruiting other temporal agents. One of the disasters mentioned in the story is the Fizzle War. The writers of the screenplay, Spierig brothers(?), did a really good job of taking the twisted timeline of the protagonist and incorporating the events of the Fizzle war to make the movie even more interesting, and thought provoking.
I'm sure Heinlein would approve of the movie. I'll probably go watch it in the theater.
It may be better than Primer... Now there is a good Timey-wimey film.
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"First things first -- but not necessarily in that order"
-- The Doctor, "Doctor
For a Heinlein time travel story, I prefer "The Door into Summer". It's not nearly as complicated as "Zombies", but it fits together well.
(Yes, I've thought about this too much.)
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
Actually, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress would be great as a movie...
In reading an interview with Verhoeven about the movie, Verhoeven believed both the book and Heinlein to be pure fascist, never understanding the concept of meritocracy and citizenship responsibility RAH was pushing. Just don't think Verhoeven grasped the book, and therefore the movie was skewed accordingly.