“What if I could put him in front of you?” intones Ethan Hawke at the beginning of the new international trailer for “Predestination.” “The man who ruined your life. Would you kill him?” It’s an eerie opening to the new minute-and-thirty second spot for the sci-fi actioner, although the distracting and disturbing image of a bald, eyebrow-less, surgically-butchered Hawke within the first fifteen seconds is something we all wish we could unsee forever.
This new trailer offers some new, alluring and noir-ish imagery in service to a tale of a “temporal agent” who travels through time to “prevent crime before it takes place” and is currently on the run from the one criminal he’s never been able to nab. We’ll watch Hawke in anything —he is one of the most unpredictable and unconventional leading men working in movies today— although the fact that the film is directed by the Australian Spierig brothers, responsible for 2009’s singularly unremarkable vampire flick “Daybreakers” (also starring Hawke), doesn’t sound promising. The Playlist’s own Drew Taylor saw the film at SXSW and was decidedly NOT a fan, calling it an “effort in futility” and that in spite of “some handsome compositions and a twinkly electronic score… [it] isn’t about anything, really”. Yikes. A release date of January 9th does little to restore whatever hope we had, but we’ll have to wait and see when Stage 6 releases the film stateside in the early goings of 2015.
Below is the official synopsis and trailer. “Predestination” stars Hawke, Sarah Snook, Madeleine West and Noah Taylor.
PREDESTINATION chronicles the life of a Temporal Agent (Ethan Hawke) sent on an intricate series of time-travel journeys designed to prevent future killers from committing their crimes. Now, on his final assignment, the Agent must stop the one criminal that has eluded him throughout time and prevent a devastating attack in which thousands of lives will be lost.
