Source Code review

• 8th Aug 2011

Jake Gyllenhaal is Colter Stevens; an army helicopter pilot finds himself suddenly on a train to the centre of Chicago, inside a stranger’s body, and on a mission to find out who bombed the train.

Confused. Turns out Steven’s has been chosen to take on this mission which involves the leaders of this program “Source Code” sending their man into a rebuilt scenario of the train journey 8 minutes before the bomb onboard goes off. Everyone on board seems real, acts real, and Stevens gets to revisit the 8 minutes over and over again until he can figure out the who, what, where, when and why of it all.

Michelle Monaghan gets to sit across from him and repeat some lines that do start to grate the nerves slightly as the film goes on 9or round as the case may be). Vera Farmiga already has a bit of a long face, so she gets to look all the more doe eyed through a slightly fish eye’d lens as she talks to Jake in the real world. Basically for the best part the ladies in the movie have their bums on a seat and yak at Jake who seems to spend most of his time not wanting to listen to them. Even Jeffrey Wright who has a cane in this film is more mobile than the women.

So it’s up to Jake to be the man of action, clambering around the train carriage, seeking out explosive devices, harassing passengers, arming himself and tailing suspects. About halfway through we discover that the film isn’t only concerned with saving the millions of lives that our main character has been the task of doing, but his story arc soon turns in on itself and he becomes far more concerned about his own situation and then about life itself.

The film’s ending offers you the chance to go away and think about what was possible there, or what we actually saw and how it turned out. But not to the degree where you will be sketching it out on paper with highly convoluted diagrams.

It’s a solid effort and decent second outing for director Duncan Jones; And yet the main thing in my mind coming away from this, as was the same when I saw it theatrically, is that the radio weather report you hear over the last few shots sounds like the exact same one you hear at the start of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off…

Steven Hurst