Dir. Duncan Jones, USA/France, 2011, 93 mins
Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Vera Farmiga, Michelle Monaghan,
Review by Carol Allen
This is an intelligent sci-fi action thriller which also dips into philosophy and metaphysics. So even though Duncan Jones didn’t write this one himself, you can see why the writer/director of Moon might have been attracted to the material. The story has certain things in common with Ground Hog Day, in that we return over and over to the same beginning but each time the development is different. The hero’s task here though is not to right his mistakes but to avert a major disaster.
Helicopter pilot Colter Stevens (Gyllenhaal) wakes up on a commuter train going into Chicago. He has no idea how he got there. Sitting opposite him is a pretty young woman Christina (Michelle Monaghan), who seems to know him but he has no idea who she is. When he takes refuge in the toilet and looks in the mirror, the face that stares back at him is that of a perfect stranger. Seconds later the train is ripped apart by an explosion and Colter finds himself in a high tech isolation unit, where his only contact with the outside is a uniformed woman Goodwin (Farmiga), who via a video screen questions him about every detail of his experience. She explains he is part of an experiment in quantum physics known as the source code, which enables him to take over the body of another person in the last eight minutes of their life. The train he was on was destroyed by a bomb a few hours earlier and the perpetrator is planning to set off another bomb in the next few hours right in the heart of Chicago. Colter’s mission is to go back in time again and again to that last eight minutes on the train, find the bomber and stop him setting off that second explosion.
Writer Ben Ripley and director Jones succeed brilliantly in the main problem of the premise, which is to make every one of Colter’s trips back into that last eight minutes the same but different, as on each occasion he finds out more about the bomber, before his prey eludes him yet again and he is then once more transported back to the laboratory. It’s a really imaginative and well thought out plot, which stretches our intelligence, as we grapple with theories of parallel universes, time travel and the nature of life itself, while at the same time giving us good action drama, engaging characters and even humour. There is one point where the film veers slightly towards sentimentality in its romance but that is cancelled out by a genuinely moving scene in which Colter uses part of that vital last eight minutes for a telephone conversation with his father.
Gyllenhaal makes a thoughtful and likeable hero, while Farmiga puts real flesh onto the bones of Goodwin, whose humanity and sympathy for the subject of the source code experiment start to take over from her military professionalism. Jeffrey Wright has less opportunity to do so as the blinkered boffin in charge of the experiment, while Monaghan makes it understandable why Colter becomes determined not only save Chicago from the bomb but to save Christina and the other people on the train.
This will I suspect become one of those cult films, whose fans will watch it over and over again and argue about its finer points. The theories of the source code are fascinating and mind stretching and the intriguing ending, when you think of the logic of the premise, is the only one possible. But if you’re not in the mood to stretch your brain, no worries. The Source Code is also a superb piece of cinematic action entertainment.
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Source Code (12A)…
In the life of a man, never/ The same time returns”, stated Thomas Becket in Murder in the Cathedral. But Becket was about 700 years too early for the cinema, where a man may experience the same time returning over and over. You only have to thi……