No Grace Under Pressure

Source Code

** out of ****

Directed by: Duncan Jones

Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Jeffrey Wright and Russell Peters

Running time: 93 minutes

Director Duncan Jones broke into the sci-fi stratosphere two summers ago with his thought-provoking celestial drama Moon, which favoured small-scale setups and big emotions over the jumbled noisiness space-set thrillers usually provide. He waited for his sophomore effort, an intriguing if poorly executed genre-mishmash called Source Code, to situate himself with the frantically paced, plot-hole-ridden sloppiness that the genre so often falls upon.

This floundering is less Jones’s fault, but the result of scribe Ben Ripley, who takes an intriguing time-travel premise and an eclectic bunch of genres but is never able to mash them together. Source Code is a combination of science-fiction, paranoia thriller, romantic drama, and murder mystery. That’s a lot of genres to cover in 93 minutes, and instead of developing one or two, we’re left with a jumbling of more than what fits.

The film centers around Cpt. Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), a pilot in Afghanistan who, at the start of the first reel, wakes up on a passenger train rattling toward Chicago and has no idea how he got there. The woman sitting across from him (Michelle Monaghan) seems to know him but he’s never met her before. Disoriented, he rushes himself to the bathroom and looks in the mirror – and sees a different man’s reflection staring back at him. Moments later, an express train rattles by and there is an explosion.

Colter suddenly wakes up in a grimy chamber with just a television screen. The woman on the screen, Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), informs Colter that he is the object of a simulation exercise sponsored by the U.S. military. He is informed that the train he was on blew up earlier than morning and there were no survivors. But it was a warning message for the authorities and the same bomber intends to strike the Chicago area later on in the day.

Colter is being used by Goodwin’s department on a experimental mission where he can be transported back onto the commuter train for the last eight minutes (the length of one’s short-term memory) up until the explosion and investigate the passengers to figure out the bomber’s identity - and (of course) save the dirty bomb set to go off.

Source Code kept me wrapped up in its breakneck pace up until the end credits started rolling. Then, the preposterous nature of the time-travel aspects started to unravel and I began to feel cheated. The film hurdles along so quickly, it thinks that you’ll forgive its lapses in logic, but much is left unexplained or isn't developed well enough.

By trying to deliver so much story in such a scant hour-and-a-half, Source Code feels rushed rather than refined. The love story between Monaghan and Gyllenhaal should be the soul of the film, but there aren’t enough moments between the two of them to get the sparks flying or deliver any romantic payoff.

Then there are the mysteries Colter has to solve, which includes the train drama, as well as how he suddenly shifted from a helicopter flying over Afghanistan to a plush Illinois passenger train. Why is he in charge with this certified mission and how did he become involved with the time-bending experiment? Gyllenhaal does an excellent job as the emotionally dislocated officer, as he tries to figure out his own reality amidst a bunch of virtual ones.

Less praise can be given to Monaghan and Farmiga, very good actresses in very banal, serviceable parts. Jeffrey Wright pops up (criminally underused, once again) as Farmiga’s boss, but the thin proceedings only call for him to be an intimidating stock character. Also, keep an eye out for Canadian funnyman Russell Peters, as (what else) a disgruntled comedian commuting to Chicago.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long for the bomber to reveal himself (or herself). Those who like their red herrings pickled and plentiful may be disappointed. This is a shame, considering how well the director is at establishing vivid, memorable spaces (another strong element from his debut shines here, albeit less so). With Colter’s déjà vu memories set amidst several train compartments, the mystery should have been more convoluted and multi-faceted.

The main key in telling a story set in a world we know but in a universe that is only loosely tied to ours is that the fantastical concepts have to be developed and explained rationally enough that we buy these unbelievable intrusions into our reality.

But, by the time the 93 minutes are up, many questions are still unanswered regarding the “Source Code” setup. In the film, Colter routinely complains about needing more time to get the answers he wants. The audience can sympathize.