Source Code Review: We Only Got 8 Minutes to Save the World!

In watching just about any movie there are moments when you need to put the real world behind and accept what is happening on screen as the reality of the film world no matter how preposterous it may seem. I actually consider myself to be really good at this and am often the last man standing trying to defend absurd things like Uma Thurman bringing her samurai sword on a plane in Kill Bill or Charlie’s Angels defying gravity and physics to fight their enemies. But every now and then a film will dish something out that can only leave me saying, “huh?” Some films recover from this and win me over again but director Duncan Jones’ Source Code is sadly not one of those films.

Two years ago, indie director Jones gave us the sci-fi treat Moon, which secured him as a director to watch. It was only a matter of time before a Hollywood studio gobbled him up to helm a big blockbuster starring the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, and Vera Farmiga. And that’s exactly what Source Code is: a big sci-fi, suspense-thriller that comes so close to greatness only to squander its potential in the closing minutes.

I’ve been fighting my inner demons over how much of the plot to reveal without giving anything away yet still be able to discuss its shortcomings. This is not easy but here goes nothing. The film opens with Air Force pilot Colter Stevens (Gyllenhaal) waking up to find himself trapped in the body of another man on a commuter train heading into Chicago. A lovely lady sitting across the aisle (Monaghan) chats him up as he struggles to figure out if he is crazy or not but then, 8 minutes later, a bomb explodes killing him and everyone else aboard the train. Stevens then awakens again in a cold, cockpit-like capsule where a female military officer, Colleen Goodwin, (Farmiga) drills him with memory tests. This, my friends, is the Source Code: a military scientific experiment that taps into the brain activity of a deceased person’s last 8 minutes of life and plugs in someone else’s brain to relive those minutes. In this case, Stevens is being plugged into the mind of a teacher who died on the commuter train bombing that morning. His mission is to relive the moments before the bomb goes off and ID the bomber for apprehension before he or she moves onto the next target: detonating a dirty bomb in downtown Chicago.

Stevens is forced to repeat the events over and over as he searches for the bomb and the bomber so if you’ve ever wanted to see Jake Gyllenhaal die over and over again, this is the film for you! In all seriousness though this is a really cool concept and Jones directs it with such skill that the tension and thrills continually ratchet up in each successive redo. We also get a ton of character development by slowly learning more about Stevens, the relationship that Monaghan’s character has with the teacher, and the moral quandaries of Goodwin as the commander of the Source Code project. Her boss, played by the great Jeffrey Wright, also adds a level of complexity as a sort of adversary to both Stevens and Goodwin that I really appreciated.

As the film progressed I couldn’t help but think that this was a damn near perfect action flick. I started thinking about the praise I would heap upon it and mentally composed texts urging people to rush out and see it. But then something went wrong. The film entered its climax and where it was once headed to an emotionally satisfying and somewhat poetic end, it instead derailed for a forced happy ending that left me scratching my head. I don’t want to spell it out since it would virtually ruin the movie for those who haven’t seen it but the film manages to break its own rules of its world and that’s what I find so frustrating. If we’re told all the way through a film that characters aren’t able to sprout purple wings and fart jelly beans but then suddenly someone is able to do that for no real reason, I can’t help but feel a little cheated and jerked around by the filmmakers.

Under that line of thinking the rest of the film starts to break down when you think back on it to a point where I began to resent it. And what’s really frustrating is that up until the last 5 or 10 minutes the film was SO good. The acting, the editing, the special effects, and the script are all so top notch that I should have been able to walk out proclaiming it the best film of the year so far, but it is instead just an honorable effort that brushes with greatness only to fumble it away as the curtain is coming down. I think we can probably blame the studio for wanting to make everything copacetic and leaving things open for sequels but maybe that’s how Jones wanted it too. Either way, my disappointment now outweighs my initial enthusiasm and there’s no redoing that.

Grade: B

Images courtesy of IMDbPro.