Source Code [ Movie Review ]

The Pitch

Think Groundhog Day meets Quantum Leap and you get the rough idea for Source Code.

One military captain leaping into the memory of a teacher who died earlier in the morning when a bomb went off on his train. The catch here would be that he got only 8 minutes of the dead teacher final moments to figure out where's the bomb and who's the bomber. If he can't achieve that, he would get to do it again and relive that 8 minutes again.

Quite an intriguing premise for Source Code. How is he going to solve this case within those 8 minutes and will he be able to save the folks in the train even though they are already dead (as the trailer suggested)? It would be interesting to how much they are willing to bend their own sci-fi rules for that.

Director Duncan Jones (son of David Bowie) was one of the key factor for interest in this movie. He had a superb debut with Moon, a movie with budget constrain but yet innovative and engaging at the same time. His debut made him a director to be reckon with and the trailer for Source Code looks like he is going to deliver another intriguing solid follow up.

The Plot

Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is bewildered to find himself waking up on a train bound for Chicago when the last thing he remembered was that he was on a mission in Afghanistan. A lady named Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan) sitting across to him seemed to know him and was talking to him. Colter tried to get a grip on what's happening and he found out that his reflection had changed to another person. His identification card in his wallet belongs to a man named Sean Fentress.

Before he could try to figure out more, a bomb went off and destroys everything.

He reawaken in a chamber where a lady officer talks to him through a small monitor. Captain Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) informed him that he is inside the Source Code. A program that allows him to take over the last eight minutes of someone's life. There's been a terrorist attack on a train heading to Chicago that morning and he been tasked to find out where's the bomb and who's the bomber before the terrorist attacks Chicago again with a larger more destructive bomb.

Before he could question more about the mission and why couldn't he remember anything between his last mission from Afghanistan to his current mission, he was send back to the train. He managed to find the bomb but before he could do anything to locate the bomber, the bomb went off and send him back to the chamber.

As he went back and forth the chamber and the train "simulation", he learned more about the Source Code from the creator Dr Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright). He been told that no matter how he try to change the past, it would not have effect in this future. The only way he could help the future would be to learn from the past and provide the information to stop the impending second terrorist attack. Unsure and frustrated about not remembering how he got assigned to this project, Captain Colter started to feel that Captain Goodwin and Dr Rutledge are hiding something from him.