Source Code (2011): Action in Purgatory

Source Code is an action-thriller about a man on a speeding commuter train trying to find an urban terrorist before the terrorist blows up the train and worse. It is also a biomedical sci-fi movie pitting a startling scientific breakthrough against our basic notions of ethics and compassion, life and death. The thriller wins.

Source Code stars Jake Gyllenhaal, and this is his movie - perhaps his finest to date. We first see him waking up with a start, sitting in a train heading into Chicago. Shocked and disoriented, he doesn’t know how he got there. All around him are commuters. In his sport jacket and slacks, he looks like them, but he's not one of them. Facing him is a pretty young woman (Michelle Monaghan). She seems to know him, and is chatting at him, maybe even flirting. She calls him Sean, but his name is Colter Stevens. Colter‘s eyes show fear, maybe even panic. Colter’s last memory is of his Army helicopter in Afghanistan, but where’s his crew? What’s going on here? He doesn’t get a chance to find out. As another train passes by, a bomb goes off, flames envelope the scene and …

Colter is astonished to find himself alone in a dusty, apparently wrecked capsule of some kind, in his military gear, strapped into a seat. From a small monochrome video screen, a woman is talking to him, trying to get his attention. This is Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), who may be his commanding officer. She asks him about his mission, reminds him that his job is to find the bomb and the bomber on the train and that he only has eight minutes. Before he can get answers to any of his questions, BAM, he is back on the train with the same commuters, and the young woman is again chatting with him. In fact it is the same conversation. The same events are repeating themselves. This time, though, he remembers that the train and everyone on it is going to blow up in eight minutes, unless he acts. He’s got a job to do.

Colter’s situation is a bit like Bill Murray’s in Groundhog Day, but with a twist: Murray relived the same day over and over and had seemingly an infinite number of iterations to get it right (although he doesn't know what "it" is); Gyllenhal is racing against a real-time clock. If Colter can’t find the terrorist soon, he’s going to strike again, and not just blow up a train, but destroy the entire city. And Colter only gets an eight minute window to work in.

Gylenhaal is finally coming into his own. Always an interesting actor, he has matured into something special. He is no longer boyish, although a sense of innocence remains. In fact, he comes across as the complete man, with a cut physique and an intensity to match, alternately sensitive and strong, impulsive and thoughtful, likeable and potentially dangerous. With his soulful, intelligent, questioning eyes, he is always watchable, a presence on the screen.

Sophomore director Duncan Jones keeps the story and the action moving along, while experienced cinematographer Don Burgess and the art and design team make it work. The film opens with a collage effect, alternating swooping views of the train speeding across middle America toward Chicago with lovely aerial shots of the city’s skyline. Eventually we swoop into the train, where the action starts. The scenes on the doomed train are great. This could be claustrophobic, but it’s interesting instead, with cameras sometimes looking down on the action, sometimes up to the second deck, following Colter into cramped spaces in search of the bomb and then of his quarry. Colter has few clues to work with and everyone on the train is a suspect, which leads to some amusing and some horrific confrontations between Gyllenhall and some fellow passengers.

The capsule scenes are appropriately close and dark; and it is there, through Colter’s developing relationship with Goodwin, that we gradually come to understand what is really going on, where we come to truly identify with Colter and his purgatory experience, and where, through Farmiga’s character, we are confronted with the ethical/spiritual issues ultimately posed by the Source Code project. Jeffrey Wright gives a convincing portrait of the egotistical, genius/mad scientist responsible for all this.

The sci-fi explanation may not be wholly convincing, when all is said and done, but it’s a good enough premise. Gyllenhaal and company do the rest. This may not be high art, but it is solid entertainment.

In current release.