Last week, some colleagues and I got an early look at Source Code (trailers), the sophomore effort from friend of the blog Duncan "Zowie Bowie" Jones, as well as an all-too-brief look at the man himself. First, the Jones appearance. Like a small, English Bigfoot caught in a grainy home movie out in the woods, he seemed to pass in front of our field of vision only long enough for us to wonder if what we were seeing was the real thing before he strode back behind the treeline. During the sighting, he seemed to be trying to lower expectations a bit among the Moon fans like us in the audience (sadly, too few in the free screening), telling us not to expect his second film to be all that similar to his terrific first. (Whether he meant in terms of its subject matter or its quality, he didn't specify.) After maybe forty-five seconds at the mic, Jones hurried off, leaving the lights to fall and his film to speak for itself.
Though Source Code certainly is different from Moon, and not as good, neither it nor Jones has anything to be ashamed of for what it is, which is a gripping, engaging, well-above-average action movie. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) abruptly comes to on a commuter train headed for Chicago, his last memory being piloting an Army helicopter in Afghanistan; he doesn't know where he is, what he's doing there, or why the stranger sitting across from him, Christina (Michelle Monaghan), seems to know him. After eight minutes, an explosion destroys the train, and Colter is now isolated in a small, dark room with few features other than a screen on which a militarily attired woman, Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), anxiously questions him about what he just saw. It's soon revealed to Colter that, using a technology called "the Source Code," his consciousness is being thrown into an alternate reality based on the last eight minutes of the life of one of the train passangers before he, Christina, and the other passangers were killed in a bombing, but an alternate reality that he can fully explore and affect. His involuntary mission is to discover who was behind the bombing in order to prevent other attacks predicted to follow; but he can only do this eight minutes at a time, reliving the last moments of a dead man's life over and over until he finds the truth.
The obvious point of comparison for Source Code is as an action/thriller Groundhog Day, but with our hero forced to relive the same eight minutes in order to prevent terrorist attacks, instead of forced to relive the same minor holiday in order to become a better person and get the girl. However, the film I was most reminded of was 12 Monkeys, in which a man from the near future is forced by a mysterious authority to travel back in time to gain intelligence about a past, seemingly inevitable catastrophe. (Hence the mangled compromise of this post's title.) Though Jones didn't write Source Code, it shares with Moon (which he did write) a ready willingness to borrow what it needs from other films, but with its own spin. (I already noted the influences of Silent Running, Solaris, Blade Runner, and 2001, to name a few, on Moon.) It uses a high-tech narrative device and action-movie setting to examine, like Ramis's and Gilliam's respective films, how inevitable or open-ended life actually is, whether we're in the driver's seat or the future is set in stone. Surprisingly heady stuff for a springtime actioner full of pretty faces.
Jones has openly described Source Code as a "one for them" film. (I believe the term he used was "director for hire.") But really, the only actual negativity I can direct at the film is relative, in comparison to the "one for me" Moon. Sure, Gyllenhaal, Monaghan, or Farmiga doesn't turn in anything like Sam Rockwell's extraordinary performance, possibly the best of his career; but everyone delivers solid work, especially Gyllenhaal with his character's blend of military professionalism and understandable frustration with the situation into which he's been forced. The story doesn't have the same surprises and thematic challenges, but it's still one of the most intelligent and compelling films of its kind that we've gotten in a while, and one that interweaves its intelligence with the action and suspence quite well, in both conception and execution. If this is Jones's "one for them" film, we should be so lucky as to have more like it during the rest of his career.
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