Source Code

It has been a long, bleak, cinema lacking time, however last week i managed to hijack a friend and make them come see Source Code with me, so i can finally blog again :D - Definite Spoiler Alert.

I'd heard good things about this conceptually complicated film, and to say that it is an action flick with Jake Gyllenhaal in it and along similar lines to a pretty bad De Ja Vu, this is high praise indeed. The story starts with a man (an always lovely Jake Gyllenhaal) waking up on a train and not knowing where or who he is. Confusion follows, until 8minutes later, the train blows up and jake finds himself alone in a dark capsual. The story follows the idea of the "Source Code", a scientific revolutionary idea, that a certain part of a dead persons mind can be tapped into, in order to send them into a certain situation for 8minutes to obtain information. Jake is being sent to this train (in the form of another guy - confusing yes) in order to find out who set the bomb in order to prevent future bombings that are suspected to happen in the present. The idea is that jake is sent not into the actual past, but a paradigm, the scientists (a quite scary Jeffrey Wright, and Vera Farmiga) stress that the past cannot be changed.

Heres where it gets more confusing. Jake finds out who is behind the bombing and informs Farmiga, and asks if he can go back one last time (determined that he can change the past) and then be switched off the life support (which his actual dead, half a body is on). Farmiga agrees without Wright knowing, and Jake goes back into his 8minutes of bomb hunting before he is turned off on the life support. The whole premise so far has been pretty bleak. Scientists have developed technology that uses (arguably abuses) a practically dead bodies last bit of brain activity, and sends them on"missions" in order to get the information they need. The past cannot change, the missions are not real, it is not time travel.

So, how on earth, do we finish this film, with the life support monitor being turned off, and Jake having succeeded in not only changing the past - stopping the bomb, capturing the guy, getting the girl - but also in staying in the past (in some other guys body). For me, Duncan Jones (also the director of the highly critically acclaimed "Moon") copped out at the end of this movie, deciding that an unhappy ending, a film of fate, would not satisfy mass audiences, and therefore decided to soften up the ending by going against everything the film has been saying so far.

This film poses somereally good philosophical questions about the development of science and the worth of one human life against the massess. There are some top acting skills in it with an on form Gyllenhaal who manages to get the tone just right, and a refreshingly good Farmiga, as always showing versatility. However, a cop-out ending that goes against the whole idea of the source code, is a bitter disapointment.

Would have been 4 and a half out of 5, dropped to a 3 because of the end. Tut.