Source Code

(Spoiler Alert) Science fiction movies have become more about blowing crap up and less about presenting a cool idea and seeing where it might lead. Source Code is Duncan Jones' second really cool science fiction movie because it puts out a pretty cool idea and then takes it somewhere.

Colter Stephens (Jake Gyllenhal) is a helicopter pilot in the U.S. Army, at least from what he remembers. In fact, he is now part of a science experiment of sorts in the war on terror. He doesn't know it but he was killed in action and kept alive, sort of, in a way that allowed him to be transported into the last eight minutes that a history teacher lived on a commuter train headed into Chicago. He looks like the history teacher to everyone around him but we see him as Colter. I thought this was a cool way of doing it. The idea is that a really smart scientist has figured out how to insert one human into another human's memory of the last eight minutes they lived. Colter's mission is to find the terrorist that bombed the commuter train before the terrorist bombs all of Chicago.

The explanation of how this is possible was a little sketchy but good enough so that it didn't take away from the plot - which is a second part of science fiction movies that has been lacking in recent attempts; plot, that is. The human element takes form in the conversations between Colter and two really good looking women. One is played by Vera Farmiga as the scientist in charge of updating Colter on mission objectives and sending him back into the eight minute missions until he finds the terrorist. Naturally, she begins to see Colter as more of a human and less a science experiment. On the other end, Colter is traveling with Michelle Monaghan and begins to kind of fall for her. Each entry into the recurring eight minute segments allows Colter to pull a Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. He gathers more information about his attractive commuter company until he finally hits her with a kiss, twice. At any rate, through all this entering and re-entering and figuring out, Colter does what a good science fiction character should do. He, before any scientist, finds the loop-hole. Though the eight minutes has already happened, fate is always fate. If Colter accepts the limits of time, or embraces the fact that time is impossible to transcend, then he can become human - he can stay in the life he was meant for by dying to the life in the Source Code. In this way, Coulter cleverly emails Vera and lets her know that the space/time continuum is in fact altered each time he goes back (she gets this email before she sits down at her desk to first begin working with Coulter), gets Monaghan to fall in love with him, arrests the terrorist, and carries on with the the life as a history teacher forever in the Source Code; or forever in REAL life.