The film starts with army helicopter pilot Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) waking up on a train to Chicago. But he is meant to be on tour in Afghanistan. And so the story begins with Jake doing a very convincing performance of a man who has woken up in another body.
We then learn that he has been recruited to become part of a government experiment that is being used to help fight terrorist attacks. Despite his confusion and pleas for an explanation about what has happened to him, the government team explain that a bomb has recently gone off on a train outside Chicago and it is up to him to find out who is responsible because they are about to detonate another bomb in the heart of the city.
What has this got to do with a ‘source code’? Source Code is the name of the government project which has been developed to allow reliving the last eight minutes in the life of a man who was on board the train when the bomb exploded. The theory is that each person contains a short-term memory that can be explored and while you are in that eight-minute cycle, you are basically in an alternate reality that allows you to explore and interact with your surroundings. It is more than a memory, it is real, but it is also a frozen moment in time that cannot be used to affect the present or future. It is not real, and yet in a sense it is.
Colter’s mission is to relive those eight minutes over and over again until he identifies the bomber and gets all the details needed to prevent the next attack.
There are going to be two types of audience members in this film. The ones who figure it all out very quickly and so are able to focus on the flaws…or the ones like me, audience members follow Colter on his journey with the same amount of confusion, desperately trying to figure out who the bomber is.
The latter will have much more fun watching this film because once you know who the bomber is, the Groundhog Day effect of the film will just become irritating.
Jake Gyllenhaal is slowly making his way up on my favourite actors list. His performance is exactly what is needed to make the army character lovable enough for you to not get annoyed by the lack of focus on finding the bomber. His love interest in the film, played by Michelle Monaghan, is the chatty Christina who is forced to watch Jake run around the train like a crazy man over and over again but still manages to make us fall for her just as much as he does.
Captain Carol Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) starts out cold and distant with Farmiga slowly revealing a more caring part of her character unlike her boss.
There are so many twist and turns that I can’t mention about this film that made it so enjoyable. I guess you just have to watch it to find out.
****
Published: The New Current
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