[yasr_overall_rating]
A soldier wakes up in someone else’s body and discovers he’s part of an experimental government program to find the bomber of a commuter train. A mission he has only 8 minutes to complete.
Jake Gyllenhaal can sometimes come across as a very complex actor, but he’s not. What I like about him is that he can go from low-budget films like “Donnie Darko,” to a big-budget blockbuster like “The Day After Tomorrow,” and then back to more independent fare such as “Brokeback Mountain,” and not skip a beat. His performances never diminish, regardless of the movie’s budget, he gives his all to everything he does and that is rare these days in Hollywood. While watching Robert De Niro or Al Pacino in their heyday, they were screen legends but in all honesty, when is the last time you saw them give a good performance? Nowadays, they seem to be appearing in films just for a paycheck and when that happens, you know they’ve lost the love and passion they once had for the art. Gyllenhaal is always convincing and utterly believable (“Nightcrawler” anyone?) regardless of the subject matter in his movies, whether he is playing a U.S. Marine, an L.A. police officer, or a boxer, you can never take your eyes off him.
In “Source Code,” he plays U.S. Army pilot Captain Colter Stevens and when we first meet him, he is sleeping on a Chicago-bound commuter train. A passing freight train wakes him up and he is lost in his surroundings, literally and figuratively. The woman sitting across from him, Christina (Michelle Monaghan), talks to him like she knows him but he doesn’t recognize her. In fact, he doesn’t know how he got on the train. The last memory he had, was of a gun battle in Afghanistan. When he tries to explain that to Christina, she looks at him like he is crazy. He quickly stands up and makes his way down the train, taking in his environs and locks himself in the bathroom. When he looks at himself in the mirror, the face looking back is not him. Shortly thereafter, Christina approaches him and as they get into conversation, the train explodes, killing all on board. Colter then suddenly wakes up in what appears to be a downed helicopter in Afghanistan.
Once again, he has no earthly idea where he is and then slowly remembers his last memory before the train was a gunfight in Afghanistan so he assumes the train was just a dream and tries to escape from the chopper’s cockpit, but to no avail. He then hears the voice of a woman, Air Force Captain Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), coming through a video monitor and asks him to verify his identity. He does so and she then tells him to stay on mission to find the train bomber before a second bomb goes off in the downtown Chicago area. Throughout their conversation, he discerns that he is actually inside an experimental program called “Source Code,” which allows him the unique opportunity to experience the last eight minutes of a compatible person’s life before it ended, in this case, a History teacher named Sean Fentress, who was a passenger on the ill-fated train. Naturally, every time he goes back into the train, the people and their surroundings all remain the same but they can change, depending on his interactions with them.
He is told by Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright), the creator of Source Code, to keep going back until he finds the bomber so they can prevent another bomb from going off but exhausted every time he awakes, he notices abnormalities around him, such as the cockpit changing shape. He finally demands that Colleen tell him exactly where he is or he will not search for the bomber any more. Reluctantly, she informs him that he came back from Afghanistan a few months earlier, officially having been reported as killed in action, with all of his limbs missing and what remains of him, is comatose and on life support, hooked up to neural sensors. The cockpit of the chopper that he appears to be in, is a projection from his brain of the last place he remembered while he was awake. Colter asks Rutledge to disconnect him once he finds the bomber so he can die in peace and Rutledge agrees. With that in mind, he goes back into the Source Code, determined to find the terrorist, once and for all.
Director Duncan Jones never once allows you to foresee the finale, a very satisfying one, until it actually happens, and even though we might think the story is going in one direction, he completely misleads you altogether and delivers one you were not expecting. I know some people who had difficulty understanding the very end of the movie because, without giving anything away, it transcends the current timeline we are watching throughout the film and then completely diverges into unexpected territory, a continuation from the original timeline but one that continues in an alternate one. It all sounds very confusing but in all honesty, it’s not, and because Jones gives us this alternate reality ending, the movie excels because of it. While there are many characters interspersed throughout the film, Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, and Jeffrey Wright are the central players and each one of them is outstanding in their own unique way. Gyllenhaal sympathetically plays a man who is thrust into an intricate game of cat and mouse, one that he cannot escape until the task he has been assigned is completed, and you can feel his every sentiment, anger, confusion, sadness, and there are very few actors these days that convey that range of emotions. Duncan Jones is truly an actor’s director, and his previous movie, “Moon,” with recent Academy Award-winner Sam Rockwell, proves as much. If you haven’t had a chance to see “Source Code,” it was released in 2011, you could do a lot worse than watch one of the most intelligent thrillers to come out of Hollywood in some time.
Available on 4K Ultra HD™ Combo Pack (plus Blu-ray™ and Digital) May 8th from Lionsgate
