Source Code. Written by Ben Ripley. Directed by Duncan Jones.
There are twenty-six synonyms for the word nonsense listed in Roget’s Thesaurus, 3rd edition. That number actually seems conservative to me—for instance, the list includes rarities like “piffle”, “flumdiddle” and “blatherskite”, but not obvious ones like “bullshit”, “hooey”, and “quantum physics”. It also doesn’t include Hollywood thrillers that pretty much epitomize pure nonsense, like Duncan Jones’ entertaining but contrived Source Code.
This critic was actually going to give Source Code a miss, until he heard that it was directed by Duncan Jones, who gave us the haunting space elegy Moon in 2009. As befits the spawn of David Bowie (Jones was first introduced to the world in 1971 as “Zowie Bowie”), Code is another sci-fi opus with a thought-provoking (or at least thought-teasing) premise: Army helicopter jock Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) disappears from the battlefield in Afghanistan, waking up two months later at the linchpin of a new weapon in the war on terrorism. You see, he’s been drafted into a secret program that, using some kind of quantum engineering, allows him to enter the heads of victims after they die. As the script by Ben Ripley cryptically explains, this isn’t time travel—Stevens can’t change the course of history, he can just explore a “simulation” based on what existed in a dead guy’s mind, looking for clues that might thwart subsequent attacks. Or something like that.
As visualized by Jones, the premise becomes a kind of techno-geek Rashomon, where we get to experience the same incident—a train bombing—from various points of view, none of which count as the entire truth. And as all that goes, the film is fairly involving as our hero experiences the same eight-minute loop of horror multiple times, becoming more and more attuned to his environment with each iteration—until the bomb goes off and the real Stevens wakes up in his isolation tank again. Along the way we also get to make the acquaintance of the dead guy’s girlfriend (Michelle Monaghan from Gone Baby Gone), who we all assume is equally deceased.
But is she really dead? Is he? Thus we arrive at the fundamental problem with Source Code: is it real, or is it the Matrix? Ripley and Jones can’t seem to make up their minds. Though quantum physics may make for interesting discussion at symposia and dorm lunch rooms, the way it tampers with basic notions of causality just can’t make for compelling drama. For us to care about a story requires something to be at stake; it requires the illusion of real consequences. And if nothing is at stake because everything is liable to unlimited “do-overs”, or sidestepped by escaping into some parallel universe, then nothing we see really matters—does it?
And then there are the more pedestrian objections. For instance, how exactly can a “simulation” based on the memories of a dead person preserve information that the original victim never actually experienced firsthand? And even if it could, the ability to explore the subjective experiences of dead people seems to cry out for more imaginative use than solving mundane crimes. Curious to explore the last moments on the Titanic? The Challenger space shuttle? The happenings on the grassy knoll in Dallas on November 22, 1963? The final thoughts of Napoleon before Waterloo? Spool up the quantum drives, Lieutenant!
Source Code makes Inception seem almost reasonable by comparison—but at least the players convince us to go along. As he matures, Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko, Brokeback Mountain) is looking more and more like one of Alfred Hitchcock’s elegant heroes, a plain, sturdy soul caught up in extraordinary circumstances. Monaghan is similarly appealing as that girl you overlooked at first, realized was a knockout in retrospect, but could never reconnect with. Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air, The Departed) is worth watching in anything, even if she plays little more than a glorified switchboard operator here, with Jack Bauer expected to break into her control room at any second.
Though this is only Duncan Jones’ second feature, there are some definite thematic correspondences with his first. Moon likewise dealt with an ordinary guy (Sam Rockwell) in a technological trap, who comes to learn that his own nature is not what he (or we) first supposed. Like Major Tom in his father’s “Space Oddity”, or Colter Stevens in Source Code, Rockwell spents most of the movie in a drab-looking tin can, trying but failing to reach out to the people he loves. If Jones’ next movie is about some lonely oceanographer marooned on the sea floor, or somebody locked in a meat freezer overnight, Jones may need to quantum teleport himself into the minds of some dead people for some new ideas.
© 2011 Nicholas Nicastro
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