Source Code

I was looking forward to Source Code because I was impressed with director Duncan Jones' flawed but enjoyable Moon which took its sci-fi seriously. The blurbs that I read before the movie's release only heightened my anticipation. How did it live up to them?

The film opens with aerial shots of downtown Chicago which slowly become shots of a commuter train out in the Arcadian exurbs. Out of blue we cut into one of the cars where we witness Jake Gyllenhaal's character awake suddenly. He is disoriented and anxiously looks around the car. Across from him is the winsome Christina who begins chatting with him. Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens who has no idea why he is on a train nor who Christina is or why she is calling him Sean. Stevens stumbles about as the train makes its last stop before the terminus at Union Station where passengers board and disembark. It gets moving again and, just as a freight train whizzes by on another set of tracks, a massive explosion rocks the car and a ball of fire engulfs everyone.

Stevens wakes up again but this time he is strapped in a chair inside what looks like an aging lunar landing module designed by R. Buckminster Fuller. On a small video screen is Goodwin, as played by Vera Farmiga, decked out in a military uniform. She attempts to orientate Stevens to his surroundings and inquires about what he encountered on the train. For his part, Stevens has tons of questions. Where is he? What's going on? And can he contact his father? His insistence proves to be discommodious enough that Goodwin consults with Dr. Rutledge and get permission to explain some of his circumstances to him.

Stevens is on a mission. His service in Afghanistan is over and he has been reassigned to something a bit closer to home. A terrorist planted a bomb on a Chicago commuter train and now plans to explode a dirty bomb downtown. "Source Code" refers to a new technology whereby a person's consciousness can be injected into the memories of another individual. Rutledge explains that, after someone dies, the human mind retains an afterimage of the last eight minutes of a person's life. In this case, Stevens is running around in the final minutes of the life of one of the passengers on the train – Sean. His mission is to find the bomb and then uncover the identity of the terrorist who, authorities have ascertained by checking cell phone records, was aboard the train concurrently with Sean, for at least a stretch. And so Stevens is sent plunging back into those final eight minutes aboard the train over and over in search of the terrorist so his identity can be reported back to the real world where authorities would put the kibosh on his little dirty bomb stratagem.

The first thing anyone who enjoys the science half of science fiction will notice is that Stevens' time plundering Sean's memories don't make any sense. If Sean had no idea where the bomb was, how can his memories hold the location of it? How can Stevens have a conversation with a fellow passenger that Sean never had? There is clearly something more afoot here than making a withdrawal from the memory bank.

Back in his module, Stevens convinces the sympathetic Goodwin to lower the veil of secrecy a bit more and reveal that his helicopter crashed in Afghanistan. The injuries he sustained were severe so he was brought to the Source Code folks after it was determined that his brain's layout was similar enough to Sean's to go venturing inside. The train and the space capsule are both products of the old brain in a jar mental exercise.

Despite being upset at this ontological revelation, Stevens carries on and eventually figures out who the terrorist is. He relays his identity to Goodwin and people are once again free to shop the Magnificent Mile. Rutledge had promised Stevens that, upon completion of the mission, he would let him finally die peacefully. Goodwin finds out that Rutledge has no such intentions and so she easily succumbs to Stevens' plea for another eight minutes in Sean's memories so he can save the passengers on the train. He feels that his actions can have an effect in the "real world". On his final sortie, Stevens apprehends the terrorist, disables the bomb, speaks to his dad one last time, and sends an e-mail to Goodwin will the all the relevant info. With the eight minutes over, Goodwin gives Stevens what he wanted – peace – by pushing the big red kill button on the console of the iron lung-like device that his torso resides in.

Goodwin gets the e-mail (or was that a text message?) on her mobile device. However, this Goodwin exists in another reality where the bomb never went off on the train. Likewise, Stevens and Christina live on in some alternate reality where they get to wander around Millennium Park and check out The Bean as he lays down a flirtatious "Do you believe in fate?"

While I am willing to suspend my disbelief to the extent that I'll accept Stevens' ability to extract the location of a bomb from a set of memories that include no such thing, I'm not willing to let the ability of Source Code to create alternate realities willy nilly off the hook. There is very little in the film to justify this. We get some foreshadowing during the sequences when Stevens is removed from Sean's memories and finds himself back in the capsule. They have a whooshing sound over a brief menagerie of images that go by very quickly, one of which is The Bean. But Ben Ripley, the screenwriter, justifies the whole alt reality bit by dropping the Q-word as Rutledge explains his pet project. Invoking quantum physics is like a get out of jail free card. All that strangeness and spooky action at a distance means that logic can be thrown out the window. Here one consciousness entering the memories of another somehow orchestrates the collapse of waveforms in a Deepak Chopra symphony thusly creating new realities. Or something like that.

Besides this, the film wastes the potential of its conceits. Running around in someone else's memories, creating alternate realities – there's a rich thematic vein here that is never mined. Instead these concepts are drafted into the service of an elaborate ruse to ensure that the love interest here comes to fruition and everyone is able to live out a happy ending. What a waste. Such concepts are better suited to films that place the emphasis on the journey rather than the destination. I wish the film had taken fewer pains to get the viewer anxious about whether or not Colter and Christina would live happily ever after and more about, say, memories and how we use them to construct our lives.

Part of my reaction to Source Code could be explained by the fact that I read a wonderful defense of Andrei Tarkovsky's films in which the author took on Dan Kois' claim that they're boring. Perhaps I was just in the mood for something a bit more cerebral, a film where the images on the screen themselves have intrinsic value beyond helping move a story along from one action to the next.

As for other elements of the film, I've got to say that the music was really overwrought. Right from the get-go it was in your face and melodramatic. Absolutely nothing subtle about the soundtrack. It's doesn't try to nudge your emotions in a certain way, it throws them in a locked box and shoves them wherever it pleases. On the good side, I will offer that I appreciated how most of the film took place in a confined space, namely either the space capsule or the train car. Precisely because so much of the movie takes place in such spaces, I sat there waiting for the events on the screen to tackle Stevens' interior states more intimately. I'll add that I thought the acting was really good and single out Jeffrey Wright's Dr. Rutledge. The character was pretty stock – a single-minded scientist who has no time for emotions – but I thought he chewed the scenery just enough to make his character fun to watch.

Source Code is not a horrible movie but I was disappointed. It would be grossly unfair of me to expect Duncan Jones to film the next Solaris or 2001: A Space Odyssey, but, for a guy who loves putting his characters into confined spaces and all the metaphors that entails, I feel that he doesn't know quite what to do to really get inside a character's head. Like Inception, Source Code takes its sci-fi premise but fails to run with it. The intriguing elements of the story remain premises and foundations for cliché.