'Predestination' is trippy Heinlein adapation

THIS APPEARS to be Bring Your Thinking Cap week at the movies, what with the notoriously complex "Inherent Vice" and, this, the mind-bending "Predestination."

That latter has provoked two sorts of responses - those who find it incomprehensible, and those who get clued in early to its hidden agenda (even if they haven't read "All You Zombies," the Robert Heinlein story from which the movie is taken).

I fall into the latter camp, hazards of a life spent evaluating movie setups and wondering, if I were the writer, how I'd blow the mind of me.

The facts at the outset of "Predestination" are these: A time traveling agent (Ethan Hawke) on the trail of a bomber is posing as a bartender and listening to the life story of an embittered writer - abandoned orphan, jilted lover, lots of other colorful details.

The barfly's tale of woe is preposterous, and it goes on a bit too long - long enough for you to notice that the movie has a small roster of characters, severely narrowing the range of potential revelations and outcomes. (Beware of reading too many reviews of this movie, which give away too much.)

Even so, the movie's final third is fun to sort through, in a "Looper" kind of way, and gives the actors some offbeat tools to work with.

The narrative, which hops around in time between the mid-1940s and mid-1980s, takes us at one point to a government recruiting initiative, where a young woman (Sarah Snook) is being evaluated for a potential space-travel assignment, and while the details of this are not important, it gives me a chance to say that Snook gets to do a lot of fun things in "Predestination," and one of them is to look like an uncanny combination of Emma Stone and Jodie Foster.

Hawke has a few choice scenes as well, and you can see why he chose this modestly budgeted Aussie-made thriller as something to do between stints filming "Boyhood."

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