My Favourite Movies: Source Code

Well, I guess you can’t get much more up to date than this choice. Source Code came out here in April this year. The trailer looked interesting enough and I’ve liked Jake Gyllenhall since I first saw him in Donnie Darko. I did have a few misgivings after seeing previous films that tried to look at incidents from various viewpoints (for example the terrible Vantage Point) but then I thought of Déjà vu (starring Denzil Washington) and thought it might be OK.

OK, spoiler time. If you haven’t seen this movie and intend watching it on DVD anytime soon I’d stop reading now and skip to my Motivational poster on Tuesday….. So, for the rest of you here’s a basic synopsis of the plot:

Gyllenhall is army helicopter pilot Captain Colter Stevens who, inexplicably at first, finds himself on a train without any memory of getting there. Across from him is a very pretty girl (played by the lovely Michelle Monaghan) who appears to be in mid conversation with him. As he struggles to understand what’s going on around him he catches a glimpse of his face in the window – and it isn’t his face. Just as he’s beginning to realise that something very strange is going on the train explodes and he’s suddenly in what looks like a space capsule. At this point totally disoriented he is talked down by an Air force officer in the shape of Vera Farmiga. After some reluctance she tells him that he is part of a special project which can send him back in time to a specific location for 8 minutes where he inhabits someone else’s body. His mission is to find out who bombed the train and to get this information back to the authorities before the bomber can strike again. But he can only do this in 8 minute slices at the end of which he dies, again and again and again until he finds out the information they want.

Now this could have easily been a very tedious film indeed – even if the runtime is only an amazingly short 89 minutes. But several things make it far from tedious. Although we are forced to watch as the same 8 minutes unfound, each time with an explosive conclusion, we learn different things each time around. We learn more about Colter, what happened to him before he first appeared on the train and we watch as he develops a relationship both with his Air force ‘handler’ and with the woman sitting in front of him on the train. We also see him trying to change the outcome of the explosion even though he is told repeated that such a thing is impossible. That for me was one of the most interesting aspects of the movie. Despite all of the techno-babble that the Director of the project used to ‘explain’ things to Colter he still tried to change things and save the lives of the people on the train knowing that their deaths had already happened. There is even some talk about changing things in alternate realities (though the story isn’t explicit about this and doesn’t really follow this up). What is surprising is what actually happens at the end of the film. I won’t be giving too much away by saying that Colter succeeds despite the warnings that he’s wasting time even trying to save people (the movies tagline: Change the Past – Save the Future kind of telegraphs things here!) I am, as always, a sucker for a clever film – actually even a film that tries to be clever but fails despite a good effort. Generally this was such a clever film. It was a bit heavy handed with the military relationship between Colter and his handler. It was a bit too obviously post 9/11 – though interestingly the terrorist is a local nut-job rather than stock Islamists. About the only thing that disturbed me about the whole thing was what happened to the original guy that Colter took over? Colter is effectively dead but has been given a chance to live again in a new body – except that he needs to eject the previous owner to do so…. And he seems OK with that. Maybe he sees it as collateral damage or as payment for saving a whole bunch of people on the train. But no one seems in the least bit bothered that he’s basically just body-jacked someone. The ethical questions surrounding this are difficult at best – and completely ignored.

However, apart from my serious ethical misgivings this is an interesting, clever and at time tense thriller. If you missed it at the cinema I’d recommend you rent it soon. It won’t twist your brain too much (unlike say Inception) but it will entertain you enough that the (almost) 90 minutes will fly by.