Robert A. Heinlein is typically considered one of the grand masters of the so-called "Golden Age of Science Fiction," that period just before World War II when the genre began to take itself seriously as literature. The Golden Age writers were typically hard nosed about realistic science within the boundaries of what was then known. Sometimes, their rigor resulted in startling predictive powers. Mostly, they resulted in complicated problems for the characters in the stories. In many ways, Heinlein was the architect of this movement. He was the most popular writer in John W. Campbell's Astounding, the primary outlet for the Golden Age writers, and his mixture of plain-spoken Americana and futurism was the template for science fiction for the next two decades. His characters may have worked in outer space, but they smoked Luckies and chased girls like everyone else. Toward the end of the 1950s the landscape of literary science fiction began to change. Social sciences began to form as much of the background of future societies as the physical sciences. Writers like Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, and Cyril Kornbluth began to explore the effects of the future on the psychology of its characters rather than having those characters just act in response to plot. By the late fifties, a new crop of writers was waiting to upset the apple cart. Science fiction's "New Wave" was less beholden to science and more interested in literary values like character, theme, and language. Older writers, brought up on the technocratic Golden Age, either adapted or found other work. Robert Heinlein turned out to be particularly adaptable. His major novels of the 1960s are a fusion of the old and the new. The technological future is still there, but the problems are dramatically different. Heinlein's fiction turned inward.
Predestination (2014, directed by the Spierig Brothers) is the first film since Destination: Moon to approach Robert Heinlein on his own terms. It's a very different species of movie, though. The story it's based on, "...All You Zombies," is as close to the science fiction New Wave as Heinlein ever came, and this film reflects that pedigree. It's not a film that will wow you with technology or with its vision of the future. It's a dingy movie that exists as much in the past as it does in the future. Its central motivating idea--time travel--wasn't even novel in 1959, when the story was written, let alone in 2015. There are time travel stories without number these days. Instead, this is a movie about extrapolation from that idea, intent on pulling it inside out and twisting it almost to the point of breaking. Where previous films based on Heinlein have been cartoons, based only on the plots of his books and not their underlying ideas, this film dives into the core of what makes Heinlein's fiction so memorable in the first place. Perhaps, this is because it's faithful to its source material almost to a fault. Or perhaps it's because its source material isn't the rockets and warfare and aliens stuff that has attracted other filmmakers to Heinlein over the years. Instead, this is a film that dives into the interior of its characters and speculates on matters of identity and existence.
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