The more I think about it, it was the score more than anything else that dampened my enjoyment of the film. Not so much bad as just… bland, I guess. It’s too bad Clint Mansell wasn’t able to do it like originally intended.
Saw it last night and enjoyed it quite a bit. Sure, there were a few inconsistencies here and there but, for the most part, found I was easily able to look past them.
Although I really wish they could have cast Laurence Fishburne as the Director (or Commander or Doctor, or whatever that guy was).
The love story was less compelling for me than his journey as he comes to terms with his situation and makes peace with his father. Those elements I thought really worked.
It wasn’t bad for this kind of of movie.
Various minor plot holes can be explained by uncontrollable effects of the insanely implausible machine that we have to swallow as an assumption, combined with brain trauma experienced by the protagonist. So for example, perhaps his first transfer was was more disorienting and dissociating than others just because it was the first time, or some of them are just no good, viz. his return to an almost dysfunctional “capsule” the second time, or maybe he’s just always on the verge of complete collapse. People can after all suffer from dissociative amnesia for no apparent reason at all, much less when in some kind of induced hallucination after massive trauma.
But it’s a rather narrowly focused stage play kind of a movie due to the limited scope and tight focus, and the characters, writing, and acting are just not strong enough to carry it off all that well. On the other hand it could have been so very much worse, you can’t hate it too much. It was at least a worthy effort to attempt to do this as a movie at all…
Pity that poor teacher’s identity and existence was annihilated so that our hero’s existence could continue, but I suppose he would have been blown up in most other universes, otherwise, so what the heck.
This week’s Qt3 Movie Podcast is on Source Code. Spoiler: all three of us liked it, but Kelly Wand’s tag line sums it up perfectly. Also, this was one hell of a Kelly Wand synopsis.
-Tom
I’m with you. I can imagine the meeting…
Dude A: How about Source Code?
Dude B: I like it! What does it mean?
Dude A: I have no idea. Sounds cool though, right?
So this isn’t a 120-minute documentary on Apache or stuff from Sourceforge?
Darn.
Terrible title but I liked it. Though not overly deep, it was more than an action/thriller an was better for it. A distant cousin to A Mind Forever Voyaging, though the reveal there is much earlier than in Source Code. Rightbug is correct; the movie went froward with the reveal at the right time and did a good job altering it’s focus.
Thanks to this movie, the Wikipedia article on source code will forever have a stupid disambiguation tag sitting atop it.
That’s about the extent of my interest.
*** spoilers ***
I saw it last night and enjoyed it (though I had to turn off my picky nerd brain). I wish it had been smarter, both for the science and the storyline (why did it take so long to realize that the bomber would get off of the train before the explosion).
But the main male and female leads do an excellent job and as a story about really about appreciating life it is surprisingly heartfelt. I wish they would gone with the ending they hinted at instead of the time travel stuff. I think it really would have driven home the emotional impact of the movie. But I have a higher tolerance for sad ending than most of the public.
MORE SPOILERS
My interpretation of the ending, and one that I didn’t hear in the podcast, is that each time Stevens re-experiences the train, a new reality is spawned, and each of those realities continued on beyond the time Stevens was experiencing it. This might be a willful misinterpretation, but this changes a stupid saccharine condescending wrap-up into something more interesting.
Consider the reality where Christina gets asked out by Sean for the first time, gets off the train, then sees Sean get in a fight with an arab-looking dude for no reason whatsoever, land on the train tracks, get hit by a train, all during a terrorist attack, and then she has to make sense of that for the rest of her life. Not so much a happy ending any more, is it?
Thanks for posting.
No no, thank YOU.
I think the question is merely whether he ended up in heaven or he ended up in an actual parallel reality. Scientist Man who played Basquiat and then the CIA agent in the new Bond films explicitly and repeatedly stated that these were basically parallel realities, though they were just snap shots of those realities and once the simulation ended they ceased to be. If Scientist Man whose name I refuse to look up is correct, you’re wrong. But if he’s wrong (I tend to favor your interpretation), and the end was Jake’s character ending up in a parallel world. . . then I think it stands that yes, there were 8 or however many more spawned a long the way.
I didn’t find the wrap up too saccharine, personally.
Consider the reality where Christina gets asked out by Sean for the first time, gets off the train, then sees Sean get in a fight with an arab-looking dude for no reason whatsoever, land on the train tracks, get hit by a train, all during a terrorist attack, and then she has to make sense of that for the rest of her life. Not so much a happy ending any more, is it?
I agree that this is probably a life-changing event, in a bad way, for her. Sean ends up dead every time (except the last), but in this reality she’s left with considerable scarring. Survivor’s guilt, the mystery of Sean’s “feeling” to get off the train (which she will spend her life dismissing out of one hand but wondering about out of the other). Sean’s increasingly bizarre behavior that lead to a lead to a traumatic death that she witnessed in full. All of these parallel realities have the unpleasantness of the terrorist attack/s to deal with too (the dirty bomb wouldn’t always be a successful follow up, would it? But it probably would be most of the time, since there weren’t any good leads on tracking it down. It being stopped would swing on some long odds).
Anyway, I suppose the critical plot question is in that iteration. The journey lasts beyond the train explosion, which I took to indicate the actual creation of a parallel reality. But that’s not necessarily true. The simulation might run a little beyond 8 minutes (or perhaps the time at 8+ is really just more of those bizzare imagines/dreams he had going in and out) or until Sean dies. If that’s the case, Jake/Sean is in heaven at the end (his own private heaven). I like the parallel reality version, but I also like that it isn’t clear.
Of course, if it is a parallel reality, Source Code will almost certainly get its day in the sun. In that case, there will almost certainly be more parallel realities spawned (at least one, anyway), and most of them will wind up with whatever terrorist events taking place. Who knows what choices Parallel Jake-in-a-box will make regarding his involvement in the program? And what of those twice (thrice. . .n)-removed Parallel JitBs? It’s fun to think about.
SPOILERS AHOY
It never occurred to me that Jake’s character might be in heaven, until reading your post. Though, for people who think heaven might be a really-real thing, I can certainly see coming out of the film with that viewpoint, and it might have even been intended. I thought the interpretations were many alternate realities or one alternate reality. This is why I thought the script was portraying Scientist Man as obviously wrong. (And I do agree with Dingus that Source Code would have been even better if Scientist Man was written more sympathetically.)
The fact that a theological/supernatural interpretation didn’t occur to me is an interesting contrast with The Adjustment Bureau for me, where I disliked that film partly because I couldn’t see it as anything but about God’s plan and angels.
What do you guys make of the fact that every time Jake was sent back into Sean, his flashes as he was going in included shots of him and Christine at the Bean, even though his 8 minutes in Sean’s body never took place at the Bean? They were always on the train or at that station where he got hit by the train. I found it confusing every time it happened and assumed Sean and Christine had been dating for a while, until the iteration where “Sean” finally asked her out. Having them end up at the Bean at the end sort of explained why we saw the Bean in every flash but also sorta didn’t explain it.
Um, he has a name. It’s “Black guy who played Basquiat and then the CIA agent in the new Bond films.”
In all seriousness, it’s “Denzel Washington.”
“Do you believe in… destiny?”
Don’t go too deep into this; it’s still a movie fairy tale in the end.
Oh, if you insist, he’s been receiving paratemporal sensory flashes of the dominant consensus reality that can be achieved when he successfully thwarts the train wreck. Evidently the majority of continuing universes contain the meeting at the Bean, and he was just following the Golden Path.
Nah, that’s pretty lame, let’s go with movie fairy tale :)
That was along the lines of how I interpreted it. It made me wonder if this had happened perhaps a number of times previously with different incidents that were then averted, and would continue to happen. At the end, Gyllenhaal’s character asks Vera Farmiga to tell his character that everything will be okay… does anyone recall if she said this to him earlier on?
She did.
Edit: Whoops, to answer your question: yes, I recall whether she did or not. Do you want to know if she did?