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| Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan have a moment before their reality explodes around them |
"Source Code" ☆☆☆
"Source Code" has a lot of critics going bananas. It's the new science-fiction thriller from Duncan Jones, director of '09's also hugely praised "Moon," (Hey, fun fact, he's David Bowie's kid!). Jones is a first-time director, so starting off he made a pretty ambitious movie for a modest price, the space mystery "Moon" with Sam Rockwell playing a lone astronaut mining energy for earth. By himself, with only a computer voice as a friend, he eventually goes out on a dig and finds something out of the ordinary, another person. The kicker: It looks like him. It is him. He either has to figure out the puzzle or uncover what could be the initial workings of his own insanity.
Those critics liked the sophisticated genius of "Moon," and now like the clever, fast-moving premise of "Source Code,' about a man who wakes in another man's body, on a commuter train heading to Chicago. It's him. But it isn't him. He tries to determine what his situation is, but all he gets out is what he is told, repeatedly, again and again, by people on a monitor he doesn't know, that he's on a mission he didn't enact, to relive the last 8 minutes of this guy's life so he can find a terrorist who blew up the train, before the madman strikes again and causes post-9/11 chaos on downtown Chicago. Go back, again and again, until he finds the bomb, tracks down it's maker. The kicker here: He has 8 minutes every time, before the clock runs out and the bomb detonates. "Groundhog's Day"-style, he forgoes the same events until he gets it right, or until he becomes wise enough to know what's really going on.
Is this really a mission, or is he losing his head, too?
Pretty ingenious high-concept sci-fi idea to me. Except I didn't go nuts over the trailers.
Although I don't think the huge reception isn't far-fetched itself. All reviewers (about 90% on RottenTomatoes) praise the film for that intriguing premise, and that it's smartly written (by Ben Ripley), aptly directed by Jones, has a good cast that includes Jake Gyllenhall and Michelle Monaghan, and is, as everyone states totally, entertaining as hell. I agree. "Source Code" has a smart script, a director who after a near-success with one gets the sci-fi form right here, a personable cast, and the movie's strength of rapid pacing. You would have to, I think. There are 8 minutes every time (and I do think the sequences were that long). Wouldn't it seem logical to push each scene, one after the next, with the colder truth intervals in reality, to move as quick as to keep upping the suspense as it does very well Jones, and his editors, too, got that down by not making this movie a sleeper, a turn-your-head-away-sigh or glance-at-your-watch-routine even as our hero does it throughout the show. But you don't. The movie is never boring. It moves along like a commuter train and never lets up, never gets dull, even for a second.
Still...
I think a lot of reviewers were too taken with it. They too loved that idea, too loved that pace, and were too excited about it and readily accepted the movie as another terrific modern sci-fi mind-boggler masterpiece after last summer's smash "Inception" who, like I, indulgently ate up. But for "Source Code," I just don't think so. Like "Moon," a movie I wanted to like but really didn't, I felt the critics were too smitten. "Source Code" is overrated.
But ah, what am I saying, anyway? The movie is indeed good entertainment, and for only 90 minutes I don't think your hedging your bets on seeing longer, or far worse, fares (and there are). Thinking of "Inception," a sci-fi extravaganza that still managed to kill me after 2, and more, viewings, was really as smart, exciting, beguiling, and had better twists and characters, as all critics and audiences have deemed it as. But "Code" isn't as smart, or as stylishly clever, or even as ambitious, as Chris Nolan's "Inception," and even as most to all critics don't mind that the science and logic, and some with the ending, to "Source Code" doesn't make much sense (neither did "Inception"), they forgive it because it makes sense enough. It does for me to, also, but only because, just like everyone else, of really how very entertaining the movie was and continued to be...
We start, after some Hitchcockian opening credits on the Chicago skyline and a swiveling birds-eye view over a specific moving commuter train, that we wake up with a man on that train. He wakes, but seems confused, even wondering as to how he got there. He sits across from a smiling woman, who talks to him like a friend, and addresses him as Sean. This Sean glances small happenings (spilled coffee, soda can snapping/fizzing open), discontent fellow passengers, and gets his ticket punched, found by this nice, smiling girl in his breast pocket. It all is, and should be, very normal occurrences for Sean.
But Sean is wigging out. He says his name is Cap. Colter Stevens of the US Air Force. We, with this smiling, now nervously smiling woman, begin to think he's got some motion sickness. Soon enough though he retreats to a john where he views himself in the mirror - to see that it's not him! It's someone else!
What the hell! Are we crazy too?
He comes out, the woman is there, worried, scared, still calls him Sean. But he isn't Sean.
We now know something isn't right. It's far from just odd, weird or off. It's a nightmare.
But only until the car combusts and licks with flame and derails on the street. The train has exploded!...
This same man wakes again, but now is in a dark cell like containment, strapped in, sweating, depleted and now is completely freaked out. Voices, and soon people on a monitor, ask him in cold tones if he found the bomb, and has succeeded his mission.
What? What bomb? What mission?
Things clear up now. His real name is indeed Stevens, really of the US Air Force, and the last thing he remembers is his copter being shot down in Afghanistan, then waking up on that train to Chicago, and now here. He, or we, don't get enough answers before we are sent, sent!, back to that train again, informed we have 8 minutes to find the bomb before it explodes again. Before it explodes again!
The same sudden wake up. The same silly instances. The same confiding woman.
Do we still know what the hell is going on?
We don't. We are only sure of one thing. Find a bomb, the guy responsible for it, and everything will be right again.
But don't forget the kicker:
Because, you see, there are 8 minutes. Colter has just 8 minutes before he wakes again in his cold containment space and is sent back to wake again on a bright, sunny spring Chicago day across from the bright, sunny, pretty woman. He has eight minutes, and the train goes boom...
Sadly, these first fifteen minutes or so is the most interesting the movie gets, because of what little Colter knows, of what little we know, that once things begin to make sense (somewhat) and we figure out the culprits, it really doesn't surprise us all that much. I'll admit a number of the film's twists and revelations I saw coming (who the bomber was, what the payoff ending was going to be, the truth about Colter's mind and body), and by the time it ended, with this ending I predicted, I was hoping for more. And there was (that last got-ya! ending that I, nor anyone it seems, still don't get). Anyway, the last thirty minutes were a wasted opportunity. I would have liked "Source Code" more had Jones and Ripley really hammered the dilemma and took our hearts away when we knew of Colter's and Christina's fate. I liked it, but I wanted it to wow me. It just didn't.
A couple other things about how smart and compelling Ripley's script could have been. The mystery, of uncovering the bomb and finding the bomber, wasn't satisfying enough. The sort-of detective track-down with Colter was the bulk of the movie, and didn't get my interest when most of the colorful train passengers I expected weren't at all the bomber when Jones and Ripley make them seem more like victims then perpetrators when Colter, a smart and physical man of means, goes all Air Force crazy on them by beating them up (I like his character, in such a situation as this, has a bit of a temper), and dumping their luggage all over the place. I wanted more mystery, more twists, and more interesting suspects.
Also, a technique some writers do and what I think should have been done here, is we should have never gone outside the train, or at least waited to, when Colter might have become to mad, to sick, that it would be a relief, and a sure surprise, when we did get off that train. And I was hoping, another wasted idea, is when Colter tries to get off, as he does several times, he gets stretched and twisted and torn and destroyed until he wakes again, because he left the boundary of the code.
Well, it is another reality, a parallel world as it is described.
The characters: Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright, and Michelle Monaghan have pretty weak characters, and aren't too interesting themselves. They were really well-played - Monaghan's smiling, somewhat creepy happy love interest, Farmiga's steely, unsmiling, but warm woman on the monitor, and Wright's stonewall, cold-blooded commander - but could have had some more history, more past, more present conflicts. We get some (Colter and Farmiga'a Goodwin talk relationships, and we know Christina has a jerk of a former boyfriend), but really, not enough.
Lastly, I've ridden the Chicago trains, in reality the Metra Rail, here the made-up CCR, Chicago Commuter Rail, and have ridden it for 2 years (while commuting to and from school downtown) and can tell you that "Source Code's" train cars are entirely science fiction, and isn't as polished as it seems in the movie. There are no automatic lavatory doors that you can push a button and it's opens for you, you still have to turn and pull like any other door. There are no LCP monitors displaying the current weather. And there are no Dunkin' Donuts! Man, I wish!
Well, it is a movie. And it is science-fiction.
Exciting as probably any sci-fi film since "Inception," but "Source Code" is no "Inception."
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