Review : Source Code

Film : Source Code (2011)
Director : Duncan Jones
Writer : Ben Ripley
Distributor :
Cast : Jake Gyllenhaal,Michelle Monaghan,Vera Farmiga,Jeffrey Wright and Russell Peters
Language : English
Running time : 93 minutes
Rating : PG-13

Sci-fi fantasy,my cuppa tea.Now what do we have here?Thoughts were running in my mind the first time i'm aware of this film.Minority Report counter report?The Matrix revisited?Or Inception extracted?The answer,a bit of all of that here and there plus a sweet homage to one of my favourite TV series from the late 80's and early 90's,Quantum Leap all cleverly cooked up to serve a refreshing new dish.One thing i absolutely love about sci-fi films is that they open us up to whole new realms of life.They present us awe-inspiring dimensions of either parallel worlds almost similar to ours or radically different ones usually populated with beings with either far superior intelligence or bone-chilling savageness.The world of sci-fi blossoms at an exponential rate,which is the primary nature of our universe,the macrocosmos and the individual human mind,the microcosmos.For all we know,science fiction may not be fiction at all,in fact i believe it is the gateway to the deepest secrets of the universe's clockwork.Lately,scientists around the world have been giving greater attention to metaphysical science and spirituality and the trend spills onto motion pictures of late as well,the notable ones being Inception and The Adjustment Bureau.This films comfortably slips into the special category as well.

Director Duncan Jones(son of David Bowie),relatively a new face,best known for directing the 2009 British film,Moon,an admirable independent effort heavily inspired by 2001:A Space Odyssey(1968) has successfully strecthed his wings here as this film marks his debut into studio financed Hollywood mainstream fares.The ambiguos plot centres on a revolutionary military backed experimental mind science programme where the scientists have discovered that the human brain retains the last eight minutes of memory after the brain's owner is pronounced medically dead.The 'pilot' candidate for the programme happens to be a helicopter pilot Lt Colter Stevens(played by Jake Gyllenhaal) who's severely injured in the line of duty and considered dead with only his brain still functioning.He's kept alive in a special oxygen chamber where special pulse sensors are directly wired onto his brain while his severely bomb-mauled body with exposed internal organs are carefully protected by a special shield.Following a deadly terrorist attack on a Chicago-bound train which killed all passengers on board,the military decided to test the programme's efficiency by identifying the memory clockwork,synapse as its referred to in the clinical jargon( refer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synapse) amongst the dead which matches the closest with Stevens and found the individual,Sean.Stevens initially doesn't know anything about this because he's completely unaware that he's actually dead and he's in the perception that's he still stuck in the warzone in Afghanistan,stuck in his helicopter's cockpit which was his own last eight minutes of memory.Eventually he learns of the actual situation and the mission which he's assigned to,which is to wire into Sean's last eight and find clues which leads to the bomber.

The film wastes no time getting into the point,no lengthy plot establishment is found here.Our hero is thrown into the thick of the action without even being briefed of his mission and unravels while he's at it which effectively conveyed the urgency of the situation,which is to locate the whereabouts of the highly lethal terrorist before he unleashes his magnum opus,which was to blow the entire city of Chicago.The best thing about the film is our hero here is as clueless as us,the audience and we're automatically sucked into the flow of the story virtually following him and naturally emphatizing with him along the way,a feat successfully achieved by the makers.Another notable thing about the film is its the sense of futility of issues in the past conveyed here through the plot setting,which is NOT a fiasco of time-travelling from the future to alter the past and save the ill-fated present but rather an attempt of salvaging what is possible from the definite past via ground-breaking present-time medical science to protect the future from greater calamity,meaning the past has happened and cannot be changed,all we can do is to learn what we can,identify the mistakes and amend the present to pave way for better future.Kudos to ben Ripley,the writer who brillaintly wrapped up this great and timeless truth in an exciting sci-fi package.Besides the science and philosophy,the film also manages to capture the complexity of human emotions of love,compassion depicted in the way Stevens inability to accept that the beautiful woman who happens to be the girlfiend of his 'partner in mind',the guy whose memory he's accessing is already dead and there's actually nothing he can do about it.Besides that,the general paranoia of all Middle-Eastern( with or without the beard) people being terrorists is effectively depicted here,all packaged with a tight screenplay,great score and all-round good acting from the cast except Jeffrey Wright's turn as the scientist-in-charge which was a tad lifeless.Also i felt the film was rather too short,clocking in a hasty 93 mins.

Despite revealing a large part of the plot,there's still plenty of goodies layered in the story which i believe is best left for you to unravel and contemplate on,sorry again for the spoilers,but you may want to( if you haven't) watch films like Groundhog Day(1993) and Run Lola Run(1998),which explores the similar theme of repetitiveness experienced by the protagonists,finding themselves the same situation at the same time and same location over and over again with new discoveries each time as they're 'reincarnated'bringing forth the collective memories together.Now this is veering into the metaphysical and spiritual realms already,touching on the subject of reincarnation and eternity,which i feel is best left for you to decide as per your beliefs.Instead of rounding up as a purely sci-fi film,the film concludes with an open-ending,like i said opening gates for infinite possibilities way beyond the established boundaries of basic science into the realm of parallel universes or alternate realities which simply makes the film stand a notch higher than others of the same genre.I'd say this is so far one the year's best films and ranks as one of my all-time personal favourite.Never to missed!

Rating : A-

Reviewed by
Amreish Siman