Source Code (2011)

Source Code opens on Jake Gyllenhaal awakening in the window seat of a moving train, hurtling towards downtown Chicago. He’s groggy and confused about how he got there and why the pretty girl across from him (Michelle Monaghan) keeps calling him Sean. He thinks he’s Captain Colter Stevens, an Air Force pilot deployed in Afghanistan. But when he looks in the train’s bathroom mirror, it’s not his own blue-eyed face he sees; it’s the guy whose driver’s license reads Sean Fentress.

No sooner does he discover all this than the train explodes, killing everyone on board…everyone except for Stevens. He wakes up strapped to a chair in a tiny metal capsule with the face of a fellow soldier, Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), projected onto a television screen and urging him to calm down. Easy for you to say, lady. You didn’t just blow up.

Poor, baffled Stevens soon learns that he is involved in a top-secret government project that allows him to inhabit the body of one of the explosion’s victims in the last eight minutes of his life. His mission is to find out where the bomb is and who put it there. But the program’s eccentric inventor, Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright), begrudgingly explains that Stevens can’t save any of the passengers–they’re in the past. He can only prevent the bomber from striking a much larger target with a dirty bomb.

Directed by Duncan Jones, who made a debut splash with 2009’s Moon, Source Code is hardly the most original of sci-fi tales. The most obvious comparison would be to Tony Scott’s 2006 Denzel Washington vehicle, Déjà Vu, that has the main character in a similarly experimental time-travel program to prevent an explosion aboard a ship docked in a New Orleans harbor. Like that hero, Stevens inevitably falls in love with one of the doomed and is desperate to find a way to save her.

There’s also, of course, the comedy classic Groundhog Day to contend with. Like Bill Murray’s character, Stevens is forced to repeat the same events over and over again with the only changes in the action being the ones created by his own differing choices. And don’t forget Quantum Leap. Jones, who slotted Scott Bakula as the voice of Stevens’ father obviously didn’t.

It’s difficult to really describe the action of the film because 1) it is the same eight minutes repeated, and 2) to describe the variations in those minutes would offer major spoilers. But suffice to say that in the race through and against time, Gyllenhaal commits to his role as action hero in a performance that’s far more believable than his recent stint as a sandy prince. And that’s in spite of the fact that the actual science in this fiction makes absolutely no sense.

It’s also pleasing that Wright and Farmiga are the ones there to explain it all. Farmiga is exactly the kind of tranquil, maternal presence I hope occupies the closed-circuit monitor if I’m ever a traveler stuck in a time loop. Meanwhile, Wright is a character-acting genius, as always, whose Rutledge is myopically callous, cruelly calculating and strangely funny.

I do have major issues with the underdeveloped love story that we’re just expected to take as fact. Stevens doesn’t learn all that much about Christina (pretty seatmate Monaghan) over his multiple revisits to those eight minutes, so his sudden devotion seems odd. In contrast to a movie like The Adjustment Bureau (a must-see love story, if you ask me), the chemistry is weak at best.

Towards the end of the film, Source Code tries to tackle some pretty weighty moral and metaphysical issues. Do we have agency over our own lives or is it all just fate? Are there alternate versions of us in other universes, created by roads taken or not taken? Who knows, really? The film is ultimately not as deep as its third act thinks it is. But along the way, it sure is entertaining.