Saturday, April 30, 2011
British filmmaker Duncan Jones, who burst onto the scene in 2009 with his cerebral sci-fi drama Moon, directs the new sci-fi thriller Source Code. (Cue the obligatory spoiler warning.) Jake Gyllenhaal stars as Captain Colter Stevens, a helicopter pilot who was on a combat mission in Afghanistan when he inexplicably wakes up in the body of another man.
He's aboard a commuter train bound for Chicago. The woman sitting across from him, Christina (Michelle Monaghan), calls him Sean Fentress. But no sooner has he acclimated to his surroundings than the train explodes, killing all aboard including Colter/Sean. Colter wakes up again, this time inside a cold, metallic chamber. He discovers that he's part of a government experiment dubbed the Source Code, a program that enables someone to cross over into another person's identity in the last eight minutes of their life. Colter's been transported back into the train from a few hours after the attack occurred.
The Source Code program is run by Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright), but Colter's main contact -- via computer screen -- is Captain Goodwin (Vera Farmiga). Neither of them initially offer Colter much more information beyond the parameters of his mission, which is to keep going back and reliving the final eight minutes of schoolteacher Sean Fentress' life until he can uncover enough clues about the bomber and his accomplices in order to prevent another terrorist attack that's yet to happen.
Source Code's Groundhog Day meets Minority Report premise is definitely intriguing, but its gaps in logic and arbitrary rules about the source code ultimately do the film in and it splinters apart like the train Colter's on. And while the story by its very nature is repetitive, at least its returns to the attack were interesting and not merely rehashes (unlike, say, in Vantage Point). Gyllenhaal fares better here than he did in Prince of Persia -- another movie where he's able to relive past events, but now with advantageous information gleaned from having already lived through them.
Gyllenhaal brings sincerity and warmth to his role, but his conviction only helps the movie so far before it ultimately buckles under the weight of its plot mechanics. The forced romance between Colter and Christina only trips up the plot more after it challenges the very rules established by the film's central gimmick. Once the rules of a sci-fi film are laid out, they can't be mucked with -- even when it's to the benefit of characters that we may like.
Monaghan and Farmiga are decent in their underwritten roles, but Wright -- one of the best character actors in the biz today -- is saddled with a hybrid of the mad scientist and amoral government agent caricatures. He does everything but twirl his mustache. I'm reluctant to lay the blame squarely on him, as the role was clearly underdeveloped to begin with.
There's no one who is hurt more by this underwhelming film than Duncan Jones, the latest genuinely gifted filmmaker to suffer a "sophomore slump" at the hands of the Hollywood machine. Jones should stick with projects that he originates rather than serve as a hired gun, which was the case here. Although I was disappointed in this movie, Moon is still one helluva testament to his talents as a filmmaker and I'm confident that his next outing will be truer to the potential shown in his stellar feature debut.
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