Review

Review Date: 3-April-11
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Juicy

Source Code (2011)

The fast-paced thriller/mind-screw Source Code opens on a commuter train heading into Chicago. Like the audience, the movie's protagonist (Jake Gyllenhaal) is dropped into the scene without preliminaries and struggles to figure out what's going on. He thinks he's a military pilot named Colter Stevens who is (or was) stationed in Afghanistan; the pretty woman sitting across from him (Michelle Monaghan) thinks he's a friend of hers named Sean who is on the way to work. After a few minutes of freaking out, the train blows up and Colter finds himself transported into a dank metal capsule where a Captain Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) is addressing him over a video monitor as if they shared a mission. She reminds him that he's been on the mission for two months and that he's hooked into the "source code," a technology which enables him to experience the eight minutes before the train's explosion in the body of one of the commuters who perished. His goal is to identify the bomber so that she or he cannot strike again. Disregarding most of his requests for information and assistance, Goodwin sends him back repeatedly to relive the same eight minutes on the train.

Colter seems like a smart guy and a well trained soldier, but from the audience's slightly broader (and less panicked) point of view the identity of the bomber is obvious. Fortunately, this is not the only mystery of Source Code, which continues to throw out plot twists and philosophical questions right up to the end. After going through several rounds of investigating fellow passengers (and showing off his "psychic" abilities like every other person who has ever time-looped Hollywood-style), Colter begins using the slices of train time to research the mission itself and how he got there. This does not sit well with the source code's inventor (Jeffrey Wright), whose gruffness, along with Goodwin's increasing distress, signals something rotten in the state of Freaky Suspended-Pre-Death Antiterrorist Land.

At one point the story switches into carpe diem mode, expressed through Colter/Sean's nascent romance with the woman who sits across from him and the idea of making every second count (as touted on one of the movie's posters). This is the routine stuff of pop film made bearable by the pull of Gyllenhaal's intensity. While this notion may be straightforward, the rest of the conclusion makes Inception's mind meandering seem like child's play. I doubt any of it bears scrutiny (alternate universes? the formation of reality?), but I can't say for sure because I stopped thinking about it when smoke began issuing from my ears. I only know that the bewildered hero's plunge into the source code is a briskly satisfying ride.

Copyright © 2011 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.