Film Review | Source Code

Good science fiction is like good romantic comedy. For every interesting film in the genre, there will be a dozen facile clunkers churning into the multiplexes week in, week out – for every Easy A there is a Dear John, for every Alien there is an Aliens vs Predator. It’s an easy genre to superficially appropriate, and mess up: just stick a couple of ray guns on a Western story, and you’re there. But proper sci-fi runs on ideas, rather than special effects. It gives us the ultimate ‘what if’ scenarios, and forces us to think about how we would react when faced with futures and technologies gone mad. And I’m not just making this up to sound clever: Frankenstein is widely believed to be the first science fiction story ever written, and look how the poor Professor Victor ended up in that one. It’s all the more infuriating when the genre is consistently misrepresented in film, the medium where it’ll inevitably get the most exposure. So it’s always a relief to find a decent slice of honest, mind-boggling bit of fun on the silver screen. The Matrix did it some years ago (I will only acknowledge the very first film in the series), and a more recent example was Duncan Jones’s Moon (Jones is David Bowie’s son – Ziggy would be proud), which took 2001: Space Odyssey and spun it into a more chilled-out (but still haunting) tale of space-bound identity-swap, with a riveting performance by Sam Rockwell at the centre. Now, Jones has been called back to spruce up a Jake Gyllenhall-starring sci-fi thriller, and Source Code offers an interesting – if not terribly demanding – cinemagoing experience: it has the twisty-turny, clever-clever beats of a fevered techno-thriller, which is leavened by Gyllenhall’s return to form, as the Donnie Darko starring actor recovers from the infantile blockbuster that was Prince of Persia by tapping into his shaggy dog charm. The central conceit of the film is unsettling but, at the face of it, bracingly simple: US army helicopter Colter Stevens (Gyllenhall) wakes up in a train occupying the body of Sean Fentress, who appears to have just started a relationship with Christina (Michelle Monaghan). A few minutes after Colter awakes to his predicament, the train blows up, and Colter finds himself trapped in a small room, where he discovers – thanks to a dispassionate briefing from Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) and resident-mad-scientist Dr Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) – that he has been drafted into a programme called ‘The Source Code’, through which he will relive the train disaster until he finds the killer. Reluctant to go along with the mission – despite his growing affection for Christina – Colter has little choice… especially when he discovers the real reason behind why he was chosen. Things get confusing towards the end, which is as it should be when you’re dealing with mind-bending stories about time-loops and body-swapping. In a way it’s just like Donnie Darko: uncompromising on plot level, and all the more fascinating for it. But the fact that it rises above being just a clever film with clever twists is what makes it truly unique. Just as in The Adjustment Bureau, you believe in the central couple, and it makes all the difference in the end. With Moon, Jones has shown that he has a firm handle of little human frailties in the least mundane of settings, and his involvement here (he was drafted in as the project was already well underway) is a welcome contribution. It’s sobering to realise that all you need for a good story is a little bit of intelligence, and a little bit of heart.