Source Code

Sergeant Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes up on a train, he doesn't know where he is, how he got there or why he is there. The pretty girl sitting opposite him starts talking to him but she's calling him a different name. He takes a walk around the train to get his bearings. 8 minutes later the train explodes and Stevens wakes up in a strange pod. He is then briefed about how he must relive the same 8 minutes over and over again, until he can determine who blew up the train, in order to prevent a future disaster. What would you do if you knew you only had a few minutes to live?

This is Source Code, a film which at its most simple is a whodunnit story, at its most complex is a thoughtful and well written sci fi adventure. You may think that watching the same 8 minutes over again becomes tedious but director Duncan Jones (director of Moon) finds a way to make each trip into the past both increasingly intriguing and eventful. Jake Gyllenhaall stars and is wonderful, we enter the film knowing only what he knows, we learn as he learns and we care about him. Its a thoughtful and sensitive performance and is one of the main reasons the film works so well.

Its nice to watch a science fiction film which focuses on ideas rather than special effects. In essence, that's what good sci fi does. It's not about the visuals or the computer generated imagery, its about the concepts. Lazy film makers forget that and try to please the viewer by overloading them with huge visual effects and explosions, leaving less time for a well thought out plot. These films look nice but I often lose interest, I don't feel any sense of jeopardy or tension as I know it's all shot in front of a green screen. Films work well when we suspend our disbelief, in the case of films like Avatar, I can't help but imagine the scenery, the na'vi and the spaceships all being created on a computer and therefore I feel less involved in the film. I get the same feeling watching a thousand na'vi get slaughtered in Avatar as I do deleting a word document on my computer, if anything those word documents probably mean more to me.

On the other hand, the special effects in good SF films like Source Code, Moon and Inception are incidental, they compliment the story rather than distract from it, leaving only the story, the acting and the concepts to hook our attention. 

Back to Source Code, I can't praise it enough. Its smart, thoughtful and pays a lot of attention to detail. My attention is on the story and it rouses genuine feelings of emotion. What would you do if you only had a few minutes to live? Probably spend the first couple of minutes thinking of something cool to answer with before breaking down and crying at how I wasted my last few minutes trying to be cool.