Features > Movie Reviews > Source Code…

Just as Nolan upped the ante on the ingenious low budget debut Following with the byzantine amnesias thriller Memento, Jones has trumped his acclaimed sci-fi brain teaser Moon with a fiendishly clever time-travelling suspense film, Source Code.

Like Guy Pearce in Memento, Jake Gyllenhaal has a memory problem. At the beginning of the film, he wakes up on a commuter train a few minutes outside of Chicago. He doesn’t remember how he got here or why the pretty girl sitting across from him (Michelle Monaghan) seems to think she knows him. In fact, the last thing Colter remembers he was coming under fire on a combat mission in Afghanistan.

His confusion lasts just eight minutes – which is when the train blows up and Colter comes to, shell-shocked and even more bewildered, in what looks like the interior of a tank or a troop carrier. He’s alone, but in communication with a superior officer (Vera Farmiga), who explains (sort of) he’s on a mission to find the terrorist who blew up the train, and who plans to detonate a dirty bomb in Chicago if Colter doesn’t stop him first. And with that, he’s right back where he was: waking on the train, with eight minutes before it goes boom!

Say what?!

No wonder poor old Colter is disoriented. Time being of the essence, as they say, he’s hardly given room to catch his breath after being blown up again and again.

Which is just as well, because the scientific explanation for this exercise in mind transference feels just a teensy bit hokey – the kind of Quantum McGuffin they don’t serve with fries.

Best just to go with it and get on with saving the Windy City.

This movie is a blast in more ways than one. It’s got that Murder on the Orient Express thing going for it, where we’re invited to check out each suspect one by one and match our investigative instincts with the hero’s. Is it that college kid with the big backpack? Maybe the grouchy Asian comedian? Or the sickly-looking businessman?

Cross that with the replay game plan of Groundhog Day – there are some delicious black comic moments – if only Bill Murray had been blown to smithereens every eight minutes.

As a technical exercise in storytelling, Source Code is virtuosic (and again, the Memento comparison holds up). You might think the repetition would become boring, that it smacks of a videogame, but Jones’s control over the information flow is masterly, and much more confidently than in Moon, he opens things up when the movie needs some air.

Gyllenhaal is terrific – as good as he’s been in a long while. In a way this feels like the long-awaited successor to Donnie Darko, the existential popcorn flick that Richard Kelly hasn’t been able to pull off.

What would you do if you only had a minute to live? Colter asks Christina (Monaghan), the girl he’s only just met but who’s died in his arms umpteen times already. The question really resonates. In so many action thrillers the big explosions ring hollow, they don’t seem to reverberate in a meaningful way with the cool movie stars in the foreground. Here – even though Colter keeps on coming back – the cycle of violence smacks of purgatory and the inferno. Jones, his actors and screenwriter Ben Ripley catch fragments of profound pain and pathos… This is not a techie film, it’s an emotional movie, very subjective, more fantasy than scientific.

I do have one reservation, and that’s to do with my dissatisfaction with the way Colter conducts his investigation  – I can’t say more than that and you’ll have to see it for yourself to see if you feel the same way. But I guess he’s not a professional, and in the circumstances you can’t be too harsh…

More to the point, I can’t wait for a repeat viewing of Source Code. In a strange way, it reminded me of one of my favourite films, Michael Powell’s A Matter of Life and Death. It may not prove to have the staying power of that classic, but this is the kind of story that cinema was invented for, that the movies can convey better than any other medium. Go see!