Source Code
★★★
(2012)
Duncan Jones’ wonderfully underplayed debut Moon caught a few people off guard. David Bowie’s son playing around with classic Sci-Fi cinema: Solaris, 2001 and even The Thing went into the pot and out came one of the most enjoyable films of that year.His second film as director acts, sadly as that now seemingly necessary push in to a more mainstream script and plot which is ultimately the downfall of a film which leans too heavily on it’s twitchy premise.
Jake Gyllenhaal wakes up on a passenger train next to a girl he doesn’t know inside a body that isn’t his. He acts genuinely baffled for 8 minutes before a bomb on the train explodes, incinerating everyone on board. A smart and well constructed introduction. But of course all is not what it seems and our sweaty frantic hero then finds himself in what looks like a test piloting room from the 60s. It turns out he is in fact a captain in the air force and is soon instructed by the military and some dubiously under explained technology to relive that very same 8 minutes over and over and over until he can successfully find the bomb and the bomber.
Source Code’s strengths lie in it’s short looping repetition and it’s put to rather good use here. The leads handle thier duties well;, Gyllenhaal managing to hold enough water with his furrowed brow type, panic, panic, panic performance to lift this post 9-11 groundhog day. Vera farminga and Jeffrey wright lend a sufficient enough hand as the stern faces on Gyllenhaal’s screens and Michelle Mognahan has just (and i mean just) enough to do to not make her totally negligible to the action.
Jones seems comfortable at the wheel and puts some nice flourishes to the tiring time travel genre, and so he should, after all; somebody realising that they might not be quite what they think they are is something that Moon played upon to great effect. Also characters being held to psychological ransom by technology seems to be a thorn in the directors side. Here, however enjoyable a ride, Source Code doesn’t quite do enough to expand intelligently on Jones thematic idiosyncrasies.
