It's evident at a very early stage that Predestination is a film that you'll really need to pay attention to whilst watching it. It's a dialogue heavy film and one that I feel perhaps spends too much time setting up its story and not enough time telling its story. Interestingly this creates a film of two halves where the first half is a little on the slow side and the second half actually seems rushed and a little messy - this perhaps explains why I found it confusing as it threw a lot at me in the final act. I also felt that it was needlessly complicated and at times I got confused with all the time-travelling - it literally 'jumped' backwards and forwards far too much with very little in the way of explanation as to what was going on at certain points within the film.

Despite the rather uneven approach adopted here, Predestination never feels like a complete waste of time; it's themes of self-discovery and struggling with one's identity do make it relatively interesting and did give me something to think about whilst watching the film. The other strand to the plot regarding preventing crimes before they happen does enough to keep the story moving, but ultimately isn't quite as interesting or original as the main theme on offer here - we've seen this sort of thing done before in Minority Report.

Hawke is pretty good here even though, at times, it sounded like he was doing an impression of Rorschach from Watchmen. Snook is the one that really deserves acknowledgement taking on a more complex role of dual characters and giving each character a unique identity.

I've watched this film twice now and whilst I got more from it upon a second viewing (and managed to also understand it more on the second viewing) I still feel that it throws too much at the audience and tries to do too much (clearly a less is more approach has not been adopted here). I couldn't help but feel that it was trying too hard to be clever as well. It probably does require a few viewings to be able to get your head round it, but I'm not sure if that will prove to be a particularly constructive use of time.