Reading Jonathan Nicastro’s thoughts on Across the Spider Verse, I was reminded of 20 years ago, when two other summer blockbuster sequels tackled the question of predestination and asked their heroes and audiences, “do we control our fates, or is every event that happens to us part of an inescapable destiny?”
It’s easy to see why Hollywood screenwriters keep choosing to explore this question, often pitting a free-will protagonist against a fatalist predestination-minded antagonist. Most, but not all of us, prefer to believe that we make our own choices, and that our actions have consequences; different actions have different consequences, giving us a limited but real ability to at least influence, if not completely control, future events.
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