This is one insanely twisted movie. So it’s a 2014 action, drama, mystery, sci-fi, thriller film that was written and directed by the Spierig brothers, with main casts, Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook.
SPOILER ALERT!
If you haven’t watched the movie yet, want to, and don’t want to get spoiled, please skip this article and watch the movie first! Or else, the choice is yours…
Quick Summary
A temporal agent went back in time to encourage his younger self to fuck his own self, when he was still a she, so she could give birth to his/her own self to become a temporal agent so he can chase and end the fizzle bomber, which he eventually realized was his future self.
The Story
The main plot is about a temporal agent whose mission is to hunt and stop the fizzle bomber responsible for the 1975 New York bombing incident that resulted in the loss of 11,000 lives.
The agent went to 1970 to defuse a bomb, had an encounter with the fizzle bomber, didn’t have much time to seal the bomb so it exploded in his face and burnt it like he’d need a new one. He did. He got surgery and a new face after travelling back to 1992. Since he failed, he recorded a message for his former self and traveled back in 1970 to pretend as a barkeep where he’d meet a guy named John.
John told a story of his life where previously she was a girl named Jane, who grew up in an orphanage, tried to enter space corp, bumped into a stranger, had sex, get left behind and heart-broken, gave birth to a baby girl, was told she suffered from the operation, lost her ovaries and entire womanhood from it, had to undergo another surgery to turn herself into a man, because from birth she was a hermaphrodite but the doc can only save one sex organ. Her baby was kidnapped and brought to an orphanage back to 1945. Because of the pain, Jane decided to had her self changed into a complete male and become John.
Barkeep told John that he’d take him to the man who broke his/her heart. John wanted to end the stranger’s life so he took the offer. Barkeep showed him the time travel device and took John to the time Jane met the stranger in 1963. John kept waiting for the stranger except it didn’t come, then John bumped into Jane, instead. He looked at Jane and said, “you’re beautiful”, fell in love, dated for a night, had sex, then ditched Jane like the stranger on that night. It was an awful one-night-stand for Jane. John realizes he was the asshole stranger who had screwed Jane’s life/his life/what the fuck?
Barkeep traveled back to 1970 to get ahead of the bomb defusing event. Fizzle bomber was setting up the bomb so Barkeep started shooting at him and they exchanged gun fires, then had a fist fight. Lame barkeep fell unconscious for a while. After he gained consciousness, he heard gun fires between his other self and the terrorist. When he got to the scene, his old self was already burnt.
Barkeep went back to John who just had a good fuck with Jane to signal John that it’s time to go. John was upset with barkeep realizing the turn of events that he was actually fucking himself. What he didn’t know is that he fucked herself so she could give birth to himself/herself, what the fuck is going on?
Barkeep was the future John/Jane/Baby Jane. He was the baby’s kidnapper and brought himself back to 1945 so he can grow as a she in the orphanage. He took John to HQ to recruit him and gave the tape he recorded so John would know how to be Barkeep, or what Barkeep did, or whatever. Barkeep’s failed. He was to retire in New York on 1975, close to the blast. That was his final destination. His device was supposed to decommission as part of the regulation, but it failed.
Barkeep looks back at the lead provided by Robertson which leads him to the whereabouts of the Fizzle bomber. He went to a laundromat to find the terrorist waiting for him and surprisingly looks like an old version of him. Wait! So the Barkeep is the future Fizzle bomber!
Fizzle bomber explains that his series of terrorism had saved thousands of lives, around 3,000 or something. Barkeep thinks that it’s a small count compared to 10,000 lives to be lost in the 1975 New York main event. Fizzle bomber says, if he shoots, Barkeep’s gonna end up as the fizzle bomber. It was inevitable. So he asked him to join him. Barkeep declined and shot his future self, so many times, I lost count already. The thing is, he didn’t report the failed decommissioning back to HQ, and this mind-blowing discovery is starting to take over his sanity. So, yeah, he’ll probably end up as the fizzle bomber.
What can I say?
Well, that was very fascinating, isn’t it? I could never have guessed that from the beginning. I think the first time I watched this was in Netflix in 2015. Earlier today, I was browsing Netflix movies and started adding items in ‘My List’. I suddenly remembered about this good old movie, but I can’t seem to find it there anymore.
I remembered how amazed I was about the plot twists so I couldn’t help myself but searched for a narrative of the story and arrived to THISBARRY.COM. It’s a good review, story telling, and explanation of events. I couldn’t stop myself from craving to watch it and I was even eager to buy it from Google Play Movies, but it wasn’t there. Luckily, I found somewhere I could see the full movie again.
It didn’t fail me. I feel like I need to watch it a few more times to catch pretty details I didn’t get to realize the first time I saw it. For example, that joke they talked about at the bar which was, “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”, that was like an Easter egg in that movie. It was so related to how Jane became John, met back Jane, and created baby Jane to grow up as Barkeep and end up as the Fizzle bomber. Nasty! Reminds me of the Marty McFly paradox in Back to the Future.
So that explained a lot about predestination. You can’t change your past or the future. One lesson I read about the movie’s comments is, if you try to change the past because someone ruined your life, you’ll end up ruining your own life. Well said.
In My Opinion 