Source Code

Take one part The Matrix, one part Groundhog's Day and one part Quantum Leap and you have Source Code. I don't mean to say that it's unoriginal. Almost all sci-fi draws heavily from its predecessors. What counts is how the material is repurposed, and director Duncan Jones does a very good job of that.

Jake Gyllenhaal plays a soldier who wakes up in another man's body, on a Metra train heading into Chicago. Eight confusing minutes later, the train explodes and he wakes up in a tank of some kind. He is told that he is in the Source Code project, a not-quite-time-travel means of time travel through quantum physics gibberish (just go with it, it has its own internal logic when you watch it). They need to keep sending him back to the same moment of a terrorist attack earlier that day. He needs to find the bomb and the bomber before an attack on a much larger scale occurs, and he can only do it in these eight minute chunks before the train blows up again and he gets thrown back into his tank.

He's told that he can't alter the course of events, because he's not really in the past (quantum physics gibberish), but see, he begins to like the girl across from him (Michelle Monaghan), so he decides he has to try.

What follows is a lot of fun. There are several twists and turns that I won't reveal, but Duncan Jones wisely doesn't pound you in the face with them. They come about in the script naturally, and each new piece of information makes the story a little more intriguing. It has a bit of a message, but it doesn't take itself too seriously.

Jake Gyllenhaal is enjoyable to watch in movies. He's sort of positioned himself to be in Dicaprio-esque dramas, but he clearly has much more of a sense of humor than Dicaprio, who seems to have none at all. Michelle Monaghan is good, too. She's easy to like, maybe because she was in Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang, and she still carries some of that movie's residual awesomeness with her.

Vera Farmiga plays the officer he's communicating with outside of the Source Code. Her main job is to believe in him. And rounding out the cast is Jeffrey Wright, as the inventor of Source Code technology. He is always welcome in the movies I watch. He always makes odd choices in his performances, gives his characters interesting quirks, and makes them well-rounded and totally watchable.

There are some inconsistencies with the story if you think about it too hard. It's a hazard of time travel movies, and pretty much unavoidable. They have been thoughtfully couched in quantum physics gibberish. It's like on the Simpsons, when nerds were asking Lucy Lawless about continuity flaws in Xena: Warrior Princess, her answer was, "if it doesn't make sense, a wizard did it." Quantum Physics is the A Wizard Did It of science fiction.

Source Code is Duncan Jones' second film, after his acclaimed debut, Moon, and they share some thematic similarities to each other. He appears to be building himself up to be the next great cinematic science fiction storyteller. While I don't think I liked Source Code as much as Moon, it's still a strong second entry, and enough to make me eager for a third. B