ALBEDO ONE - Film & TV Reviews
Source Code
directed by Duncan Jones

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Quantum Mechanics and Parabolic Calculus

In Source Code Jake Gyllenhaal plays Captain Colter Stevens whom we meet jolting into consciousness on a double-decker Chicago commuter train. His last memory piloting an Apache attack helicopter in Afghanistan through clouds of flak and dust isn’t reconciled with the sudden vertiginous plunge into a train carriage hurtling through the American suburban heartland.

Sitting across from him is Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan) who seems to be a close friend, and is thanking him for his advice, and as will be later revealed, fortunate to be the recipient of plain ‘dumb luck.’ In a panic, Colter bolts to the washroom and finds himself staring at another person’s face in the mirror. Thoroughly disoriented, he stumbles on the edge of a nervous breakdown, and at the 8 minute mark of his new-found consciousness, Colter, Christine and the train are obliterated in a massive terrorist bomb explosion.

As the blossom of fire dissipates we find Colter strapped into a space pod like a NASA test-pilot,  blinking at a plasma screen through which a militarily attired woman named Colleen Godwin (Vera Farmiga) is brusquely re-orienting him to continue his ‘War on Terrorism’ mission with a deck of playing cards. Lurking creepily in the background is a Svengali named Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) who is the architect of Colter’s mission.

Just as a light bulb retains a glow after it is switched off, the human nervous system retains a residual consciousness for 8 minutes after death, explains Rutledge to a pop-eyed Gyllenhaal, before packing him off down a digital wormhole and back to the recurring events on the doomed Chicago bound train.

By applying Quantum Mechanics, Parabolic Calculus, and Synaptic Mapping, Rutledge and his team have appropriated Colter’s consciousness and source coded his personality into the body of a teacher who has been recently killed in the terrorist train bombing. The goal of the mission is to discover the identity of the bomber, and prevent him from setting off a ‘dirty’ nuclear bomb threatening to annihilate Chicago.

Colter is repeatedly sent back through the portals of time and space to re-live the last 8 minutes of the young teacher’s life and with every iteration, grows closer to Christina, uncovers the bomber’s home grown identity, and the horrifying reality of his own fate in Afghanistan. Despite Rutledge’s protestations, he also discovers the possibility that from the hermetically sealed pod, he can alter his new-found life course and save the train passengers from their pre-ordained deaths.

Source Code embraces the space-time compression fostered by the digital revolution, with internet and mobile phone technology facilitating the film’s parallel time track plotlines. The film also hints at the emotional dis-association which characterizes the remote piloting of drones currently being employed by the coalition forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and its coda hauntingly re-invokes the voiceless terror of the faceless soldier in the 1971 movie Johnny Got His Gun.

Directed by Duncan Jones (Moon, 2009) and scripted by Ben Ripley, Source Code plays with  the metaphysical questions of free will and fate, while providing an apt social commentary on the West’s internalization of the seemingly never ending War on Terror. Source Code is the twenty-first century thinking person's answer to the Reagan Era 'Back to the Future' franchise, and will entertain and intrigue in equal measures. Four Stars!

Source Code (2011)
Duncan Jones (Director)
Summit Entertainment

Review by Charles Travis.
Published first online (10/04/11).