Source Code: three and a half stars
Rated: PG-13 for violence and coarse language
Source Code is like Groundhog Day on speed. It grips you by the throat from the very beginning and doesn’t let go until ninety-three minutes later. It is an ingenious thriller that’s being marketed as science fiction, but the science is preposterous. Does that matter? Absolutely not: it still delivers one of the most riveting rides I’ve had in a long time.
Picture this: a man wakes up on a commuter train. His name is Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal). That part he is sure of. What he isn’t certain of is why he’s on this train sitting across from Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan), a woman he has never seen before in his life but someone who clearly knows him. The worst part is when he enters the washroom and discovers someone else’s face looking back at him in the mirror.
How can this be? What’s going on? The beauty of this film is that we are thrown into this web of confusion right alongside Colter and over time begin to unravel its secrets strand by silky strand.
Moments later the train explodes in a wave of destruction. But this is not the end. Colter awakens in an army facility somewhere, trapped in what appears to be some kind of military pod. He can hear a voice, then sees a face on a computer screen. It’s a scientist named Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga). She informs Colter that the train he was on exploded that morning, killing everyone on board. They were able to harvest eight minutes of memories from on of the passengers and implant them in Colter’s brain. This is kin to the theory that the image of a killer stays embedded on the victim’s retinas for a few moments after they are killed.
Colter is charged with the duty to discover who planted the bomb on the train. Not to stop it from happening, because it already happened; just observe and report. That’s where the Groundhog Day syndrome begins to take effect. Mr. Stevens must relive those eight minutes over and over again until he finds out the identity of the terrorist.
What we have here is something that for all intents and purposes comes across as hard science-fiction. But it’s not. Sci-fi today involves blowing stuff up for the sake of an explosion. Traditional science-fiction presented us with a problem then explored its implications. Source Code is much more polished. It’s fun, exciting, and impossible to turn away from
‘Til next time! See you at the movies.
