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Predestination (2014) starring Ethan Hawke as the Barkeep and Sarah Snook as the Unmarried Mother is a seriously messed up movie.

Wait! Let me explain.

I’m still trying to decide if I even like it.

The film really did hold my attention, was highly suspenseful, horrific in parts (the burning face and subsequent disfigurement), and was an able mystery to say the least.

But it was also a seriously messed up movie.

Last night, I was surfing online looking for a film I haven’t seen before and one that I might possibly like. Especially the further we get into the 21st century, those movies are becoming scarce.

“Predestination” had an interesting premise and had fairly good reviews (which don’t necessarily mean anything), so I gave it a shot. I like time travel stories.

It was nothing like I imagined.

Oh, if you’ve never seen the movie and think you might want to without spoilers, stop reading now.

The movie begins with a mysterious figure in a public place, a transportation hub perhaps. The figure is carrying two cases. One appears to be a violin case. The figure shoulders a door open and descends to a basement used for large machines that probably run the building.

There’s a bomb. The figure intends to remove it and put it in a protective container. Someone else is there. They exchange gunfire which distracts the figure. The person almost gets the bomb inside before it explodes. He’s covered in flames on his head and arms. Desperately, he tries for the violin case. Another figure, it could be the attacker but we don’t know, pushes the case to the injured man.

This was a time traveler. His mission was to stop a mass murder in the past. The organization he works for knows that sometime in 1975, the “fizzle bomber” will detonate a bomb in New York City that will kill tens of thousands of people.

Our injured person undergoes reconstructive surgery which changes his face and voice. He wants one more chance at the bomber.

Shift to 1970, a bar in New York. I didn’t get right away that the injured time traveler was the Barkeep. He notices another person entering, who we find out is “John,” who writes a “true confessions” column called “The Unmarried Mother.”

They strike up a conversation and John says he bets the Barkeep he has a story more fantastic than anything he’s heard before. They bet on it.

At this point, I’m trying to figure out which one of them is the bomber because it has to be one of the two of them. Little did I know…

“John” starts telling the Barkeep a very long story about how she (that’s right) was left on the doorstep of an orphanage in 1945 and her unhappy but remarkable childhood.

The story is so long, I started to wonder what the deal was. This could have been any story in any movie not involving time travel. As it turns out, the details are important.

John started life out as Jane, very strong, very bright, attractive but not beautiful. Never getting a family or anything she wanted.

She’s recruited as a “service person” for the space program, basically a woman who will go up in space for long periods of time to have sex with the male astronauts.

It’s hinted more than once in the movie that there’s something odd medically with Jane.

She’s booted out when she gets into a fist fight with one of the other women. It’s not the real reason, but that’s what she’s told.

Going to night school, she meets and falls in love with a man. We never see the man’s face, which is a huge red flag.

He abandons her for no reason and Jane discovers she’s pregnant. After a caesarian birth, her doctor says they had to perform a hysterectomy because of excessive bleeding. They also discovered that Jane had both male and female sex organs. The female organs were gone, but surgically, she could transition into a male.

Let’s be clear, Jane is intersex which is an actual, if rare, medical condition. The point here, for the sake of the plot, is that Jane must adopt a new identity, a male identity as John.

Not long afterward, a mysterious man kidnaps her baby, which she has also named Jane. She presumes the kidnapper is the child’s father.

The Barkeep is only somewhat impressed with the story. He offers John the opportunity to kill the man who ruined her…his life and guarantees no consequences.

They’ve both had enough to drink (I’ve never been in a bar where the bartender drinks with the customers and plays pool with them) and he leads John down into a cellar, introducing him to the time machine the device in the violin case. They travel back to 1963, the day Jane meets her mystery lover. Barkeep gives John a gun telling him to shoot the guy and that he’ll be back for him later.

Surprise. John is the mystery lover. That’s right. He falls in love and has sex with himself/herself and makes her pregnant. The same person as a male and female make a baby together, but that isn’t the weirdest part.

I won’t go through the whole thing, but we find out the Barkeep is the one who kidnaps Jane’s baby, takes her back to 1945 and leaves her on the steps of an orphanage where she becomes baby Jane. Daddy, Mommy, and baby are all the same person.

It gets worse.

After being convinced by the Barkeep that abandoning Jane is the right thing to do (he is in love with her, in love with himself, and doesn’t want to leave), he becomes another time agent looking for the fizzle bomber.

John is the agent horribly disfigured and Barkeep, who also tried and failed to stop the bomber, was the one who gave injured John the violin case.

So far, the whole purpose of the time bureau seems to be the convoluted creation of Jane/John.

It gets even worse.

Barkeep has reached his jump limit and has to retire. He’s already showing signs of dementia and psychosis. He chooses to retire in New York City in 1975 apparently not ready to give up looking for the bomb. On his last mission, he found a piece of the bomb’s timer and gave it to his boss Mr. Robertson (Noah Taylor). Robertson gives Barkeep the analysis which says to look up the manufacturer.

That leads Barkeep to the Bomber. The Bomber is his older self. I should say that Barkeep’s time machine was supposed to go inert after he retired, but it didn’t. The Barkeep bomber kept time traveling committing all of his crimes.

They have a bizarre conversation where the Bomber says he’s actually prevented worse atrocities by killing the thousands of innocents he’s blown up. Barkeep refuses to become him and kills him.

There’s a sequence where Barkeep buys an antique typewriter and starts writing a true confessions novel. We see Barkeep with his shirt off and he has the same surgical scars as John. Yes, Barkeep is John after reconstructive surgery (which also makes him taller and changes his body type).

The question now is can Barkeep/John/Jane change their destiny and not become the bomber and how will that effect the past, since the bureau’s only reason for existing is to catch the bomber?

The end.

I told you it was messed up.

I suppose there’s a demographic that will really appreciates the gender switch from Jane to John. They will no doubt see it as “affirming” and as “representation” and all that. Except that being intersex is not the same as being trans, gender fluid, or non-binary.

Jane totally accepted being a woman and was shocked and dismayed at the news of her being intersex. I’m not sure, even with a hysterectomy, why she couldn’t have stayed female (except the plot needed Jane to become John). She didn’t want to become male, and only reluctantly adopted a male physique and persona.

I don’t know if this was done intentionally, but Jane was always colorful and if not supermodel beautiful, lovely and appealing. John was colorless, bland, unappealing and yes, actress Sarah Snook makes a pretty homely guy. She looks great as a woman.

I actually don’t know what the purpose of the movie was. Except for catching the bomber, the time bureau had no purpose. If stopping the bomber was the whole reason it existed, then once the bomber’s identity came to light, you just had to go back and murder baby Jane in 1945.

But the entire movie is about impossible paradoxes. I’m sure it violates a whole bunch of causality laws for a person to have sex with themselves, make the female self pregnant, and have the female baby go back in time and be them…over and over again.

The stated reason for all this monkey business was to create the perfect time agent, one with no past and no future, someone completely disconnected from history. All it really did was create a completely fucked up human being who eventually went crazy and became a mass murderer. You didn’t need exceeding the time jump limit to make this person a total emotional mess.

Technically, the film was well executed and Snook delivered a standout performance as both Jane and John. But that’s one hour and thirty-seven minutes of my life I’ll never get back.

Now for the kicker. The movie was based on a short story called “All You Zombies” by Robert Heinlein. I didn’t see that coming but then, I didn’t see anything in the movie coming either.

I’m going to have to watch something I know I’ll really like just to clear the “ick” out of my brain. I’ll never watch this movie again. Please, never, ever reboot this movie. It’ll only get more “ick.”