Week 5: Source Code
Directed by Duncan Jones
93 minutes
16th October, Sunday. Pleasance Theatre.
Hot off the success from Moon, Duncan Jones stays with the science fiction vein and gives us an excellent concept of a thriller with Jake Gyllenhaal playing the lead role of a US military helicopter pilot who is part of a scientific project tentatively titled ‘Source Code’. The Source Code is a project that allows you to be inserted into the last eight minutes of someone’s life and assume his or her identity for that amount of time.
Pilot Colter Stevens finds himself as a train passenger, a teacher called Sean Fentress. Confused, Stevens fixates on the woman he seems to be travelling with, Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan). Questioning her, admitting he is not ‘Sean Fentress’ and then, at the end of eight minutes, explodes as the train is targeted by a bomb attack, destroying two trains and ending the lives of the passengers. Stevens then wakes up, disorientated, he his contacted through a video link to Air Force Captain Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) who informs him of his involvement in the project. Panicked and full of questions Goodwin evades answering and informs him that time is of the essence and that Stevens must go back into the Source Code to try to find out who it was on the train that caused the bomb to go off as there is another threat of attack on the city.
The film goes at a hurtling pace and at no point do the relived motions and actions get tiresome. Gyllenhaal proves to be the anchor of the film: likeable, smart and adaptable which just makes you root for him to succeed.
Source Code is definitely a science-fiction to bookmark. Exciting, stimulating and emotional – Jones shows that in the wave of newly noticed directors, he is here to stay.
Written by Raymah Tariq