Talk about rude awakenings. One minute, Captain Colter Stevens is piloting a military helicopter in Afghanistan, and the next, he’s on a commuter train.
Seated across from him is a beautiful woman, who looks at him and says, “I took your advice.” She clearly knows him, but he has no idea who she is. Confused, he stumbles to a bathroom and looks in a mirror. The face that stares back at him is not his. Moments later, a bomb goes off and all of the passengers die.
All of the passengers except Stevens, who regains consciousness inside a dark, metallic chamber. He tries to get up, but he’s strapped to a seat. As he’s struggling to escape, a female voice draws his attention to a monitor located in front of him. The woman on the screen, who’s wearing military dress, attempts to calm him down. She succeeds when she runs a memory program that helps Stevens remember her name: Goodwin.
Then she asks Stevens if he found the bomber.
Before Stevens slips back into a state of confusion, Goodwin explains his situation: He’s inside the Source Code, a top secret program that allows people to relive the last eight minutes of a dead person’s life. That morning, someone blew up a commuter train enroute to Chicago, killing everyone onboard. The Air Force believes it was a “letter of intent,” meaning whoever detonated the first bomb is planning a more devastating attack.
Stevens needs to go back into the Code, find the bomber, and then report his findings to her.
Zoom! Whoosh! He’s back on the commuter train, seated across from a beautiful woman who says, “I took your advice.”
What a set up. And what a movie! “Source Code” is a well constructed and intelligent science fiction thriller designed to draw viewers into an unfolding mystery. Each time Stevens revisits the train, he learns something about the bombing, and each time he returns to the capsule, something new about the Code comes to light.
Then there are the brief visions Stevens sees of a park and a woman when he’s traveling between the two. There literally is not a moment when “Source Code” is not moving forward, or when it ceases to be anything less than exhilarating. I spent every one of its 93 minutes leaning forward in my seat.
I was so caught up in the story, I didn’t even mind the movie’s weak explanation of the technology behind the Source Code. When Stevens insists on learning more about the program, all the project lead does is mumble something about “quantum physics and parabolic calculus.” While this reveals nothing about how Stevens is able to inhabit the body of a person who’s died, it leaves the door open for the Code to be more than even its creator believed it was. You can almost hear writer Ben Ripley and director Duncan Jones saying, “Can we skip the boring stuff and get back to solving the mystery?”
I was eager to get back to the thriller aspects of the movie as well. But as intrigued as I was about the identity of the bomber and his plans for causing even greater destruction, I was more interested in where Stevens was going to end up, as “Source Code” tells a surprisingly human story.
As Stevens learns more about the potential of the Code, he reaches out in ingenious ways to reconcile with his father, save the woman seated across from him on the train, and contact Goodwin in the world of the Code. A great performance by Jake Gylenhall made me care about what happened to him.
There’s a lot going on in “Source Code.” Not only do Ripley and Duncan deal with the bomber, unravel the true nature of the Code, and resolve the quests Stevens takes on, they invest the movie with a perpetual sense of urgency. On the train, Stevens never has more than eight minutes to get what he needs, and in the capsule, the clock is always ticking on the second attack.
Yet Stevens is able to establish genuine connections with the people around him, including Goodwin and the woman on the train. The movie also explores a number of thought-provoking themes, such as isolation and the importance of living with intent, as well as interesting scientific theories like alternate universes and the untapped power of the human mind.
Don’t ask me how Ripley and Duncan were able to package all of that material into one movie without losing focus, balance or momentum. Maybe they used quantum physics and parabolic calculus. What I do know is “Source Code” is a great movie that scales the same heights as “Inception” did last year, and I’m looking forward to seeing it again.
Rated PG-13 for violence and language. Three-and-a-half stars out of four. Next week: “Insidious” and “Hannah.” Email David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.com.