By Nick Venable | 6 years ago

Independent sci-fi movies often take ages to get from the conception stage to the audience’s eyeballs, much like their big-budget counterparts, only with paltry marketing and release dates that come soon after their announcements. It’s a waiting game any way you look at it, and we’ve been looking at the time-traveling mindbender Predestination for around two years now, with still no sign of when Stage 6 Media will announce a domestic release date. Luckily, distribution company Screen Australia has finally released the first real poster for Predestination, and it’s almost as busy as the film’s storyline.

The film is directed by German-born Australian brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, which may explain why Australia is getting the first crack at visual marketing. The poster is a pseudo-photomosaic image of Ethan Hawke as the hat-wearing, mustached Temporal Worker whose life gets a little hectic, to say the least. It’s a pretty cluttered poster, with all the tiny repeating images having to compete with the combination lock title, the tagline, and the blurbs. Granted, those are pretty encouraging quotes, as emotionally satisfying time travel movies are a rare breed. (Primer is one such example, assuming the emotion you’re going for is spittle-flinging confusion.) I can’t tell if the images are supposed to be important or not, but they all look dated to me.

Predestination is based on Robert L. Heinlein’s short story “–All You Zombies–,” though the movie sounds like it bears little resemblance to that original story. Hawke’s character has spent his career going back and forth through time in an effort to keep the peace. His final assignment proves to be his toughest one, though, as he has to chase the one antagonist who has repeatedly slipped through his fingers. Perhaps there’s a marked effort to keep the short story’s spoilery twists out of audience’s minds before the film is released, but I’m wary of the Spierigs just using Heinlein’s name as a jumping-off point. But then again they made the clever and enjoyable Daybreakers, so maybe I won’t presume the worst about them just yet.

It makes one wonder where these hairdresser-looking helmets come into play. Does the still below show us how these people time travel?

Predestination premiered at this year’s SXSW to mostly positive reviews, and it will next make its way up into Canada for the genre-friendly Fantasia Festival. Maybe the buzz coming off of that fest will be good enough to make Stage 6 grace our lives with this movie in the near future.