Source Code, The New Duncan Jones Movie

That’s a distinct possibility, and I have been wondering about it. In the parallel reality scenario, every world with a source code project that initiates a “simulation” spawns a new reality. It’s not necessarily true that every spawned reality will be a source-code world, I suppose, but that seems irrelevant to me. There’s going to be an infinite number of parallel realities with source code, spawning that many more such realities. But it’s also possible we were already in a parallel reality when the movie opened.

Jerri, I don’t remember what those look liked. Allegedly there are only 8 minutes of Sean’s life that are in the simulation. However, the system arguably doesn’t work exactly like “Denzel Washington” (lol) predicted. According to him there are no parallel realities that come into being (rather, it’s just a simulation of a parallel reality that is close to, but not exactly like, our own), but that is very much in doubt. That begs questions that we can’t answer really. Those memories are perhaps after effects of the reality coming into being; the 8 minutes is mostly accurate but it doesn’t quite work like it’s supposed to, and as the reality comes into being it must create a past. Or something. I’m with Miramon, it’s a movie Fairy Tale in the end so there’s no real way to answer that adequately. But it is fun to think about.

I think my only remaining question is why Jakesoliderman didn’t press the point about being in the simulation longer than 8 minutes in the one where he died on the tracks.

I just saw it last night enjoyed it. Not sure it’s as good as the reviews it’s been getting make it out to be but it’s still an enjoyable movie and I’d recommend people go see it. I think Moon is quite a bit better though.

My take is this movie is heavily based on the Many-worlds and/or the Multiverse hypothesis. Both are very similar. How the project actually works is left somewhat open but the explanation that’s implied is that Colter is jumping between alternate realities. This is either accurate and he simply continues to exist in Sean’s body in that particular alternate reality through to the end of the movie or he’s actually jumping through time (not realities) and is able to alter events in that individual reality. Ultimately I don’t think either interpretation matters, Colter continues to live in Sean’s body in whatever reality he’s in.

I don’t believe any theological interpretation is intended. I’m also wondering why the morality of basically making Sean cease to exist wasn’t explored. Seems like a missed opportunity, though also might be out of scope for the movie.

I don’t think the existence or use of the source code project creates the realities, it just allows travel between them. In that case there also isn’t a one true reality, all exist as peers so what reality the movie starts in isn’t relevant, it’s the anchor reality for the story being told.

You’d think by this point in time we’d stop seeing serious stories where computer programs are treated like magic.

And yet life goes on.

I thought about this but I don’t really care for it. It’s certainly possible alternate realities might already exist. But it seems unlikely the software - even the magical software in a world with magical quantum physics - could have such an unintended side effect. Of course, the question of whether an alternate reality sprang into being upon a simulation executing when it was run is sort of moot I guess. The realities themselves are sort of irrelevant until we look at them (or something to that effect).

I agree about the fate of the actual Sean being something worth exploring more. But it’s also worth pointing out that without the deus ex machina from Source Code, Sean is dead as fried chicken in the final reality. I’m not saying that makes it ok.

I saw this last night and enjoyed it. I like how everything stops in the last run through as he hits 8 min mark. I thought that was the end, but then it ran for another few mintues and had two more endings. I wasn’t dissapointed with those, but I thought the freeze frame felt like the right place to stop.

I agree with peacedog that I disagree with this statement. My interpretation was that the source code project was spawning the parallel universes. That is certainly what Gyllenhaal suggests in his text to Vera Farmiga.

And, just to make sure we’re all on the same page, it was clear to me that she received that text in the reality where he saves the train and wins the girl. In the reality where she unplugs him she has no idea that he survives in an alternate reality and that the program was actually generating alternate realities.

This is the case although I would temper that by saying she has SOME inkling that he may indeed survive in an alternate reality. At least that’s my read on her performance and ultimate persuasion to act as she did.

Colter only has a vague (at best) understand of how the project works. Mr Science man, from what I remember, made it pretty clear that they’re dealing with a Many-worlds/Multiverse scenario. Either way it doesn’t really matter.

And, just to make sure we’re all on the same page, it was clear to me that she received that text in the reality where he saves the train and wins the girl. In the reality where she unplugs him she has no idea that he survives in an alternate reality and that the program was actually generating alternate realities.

I thought it was intentionally ambiguous if it was an alternate reality or if Colter had actually been time traveling and altered history.

*** SPOILERS ***

Unfortunately its not. She receives the text from him before the events start. So he did time travel, and barring some new dimensional gate in verizons texting system (he is not going to like those roaming charges) there isn’t a multiple reality scenario here.

Granted its time travel in taking control of an existing person (rather than jumping your own body back) so the multiple versions don’t occur since he is changing the single timeline (he is reloading save games).

This is incorrect. The text thing was set up earlier in the movie.

– During his second trip Colter recognized that there were subtle differences from the first time around. “It’s the same train but it’s different.”

– On a subsequent trip two important things happen. Colter saves the girl and survives past the 8 minute mark. The source code only covers the 8 minute period leading up to the detonation of the bomb but his fight on the platform with the motion sick guy takes place after the train blows up. When he gets back he’s excited. “I saved someone,” he says. They try to verify this and confirm that, in fact, he did not save the girl. She died on the train. (In their reality.)

– Finally, the text message was foreshadowed when he tried calling the base and left a voice mail for the doctor. When he tells the doctor this the doctor assures him that he received no voice mail. “Next time I’ll order you a pizza and we’ll see if that leaves an impression!” Colter replies.

Eventually Colter puts all of these pieces together to realize that these are separate realities. The text that he sends Vera Farmiga is like the phone message he left for the doctor. It only exists in a single reality.

Exactly. And in that reality, the train didn’t blow up and the dirty white boy, er, bomber, was caputured. Jake sends Goodwin an email and she goes into the boss’s office to discover that the terrorist “threat” was just so much noise.

I really enjoyed this movie, despite the magic implausible sciencey bullshit that forms the foundation of the plot. Just wave that shit aside. If you focus on that too much, it spoils things. Speaking of spoiling things, I wish I’d gone into this cold, like I did Hanna. The trailer doesn’t give away -everything- by any means, but when I know perfectly well from the trailer that Jake’s revisiting the memories of a dead guy killed in a terrorist attack, it does hurt the opening until he figures that part out himself.

The movie was entertaining enough (if not quite worthy of the high praise it’s getting from a lot of critics), but holy crap, I hated, HATED that (SPOILERS, SORT OF BUT NOT REALLY) freeze frame at the end. To me, the characters in the film were very thinly sketched (a limitation of the story’s structure) so I didn’t feel any real attachment to any of the characters… and as a result, that moment in the film was cheesy beyond imagining. (END THE VAGUE SPOILER SECTION)

I can see why Duncan Jones was attracted to the story, but I hope he writes as well as directs his next film. This one didn’t measure up to Moon.

I saw it yesterday and the best I could say about it was that it kept me interested despite neither being pulled in by the mission to find the identity of the bomber nor by Colter’s struggle to figure out his current existence. I enjoyed the characters of Christina and Goodwin more so than Colter, too. MOVIE END SPOILERS: The movie should have cut at the freeze on their last kiss. Everything after that was unnecessary. It’s like someone said “oh, we need a happy ending so how about this” and tacked on a bunch of scenes in an attempt to give it a feel-good send-off. Unfortunately, for me, those scenes fell with a ginormous thud. Truly an awful ending. SPOILERS OFF

I’m disappointed I didn’t go see Hanna instead.

Saw it tonight, really, really liked it. Despite the various nits (and flat out wrong assumptions) being made in here, my only real problem with this occurs after the credits. How the hell does Colter go and live Sean’s life? Sean’s got family Colter won’t know! Co-workers Colter won’t know. Hell, how is Colter going to teach history?

Yeah, Colter’s life going forward could easily be made into another movie, given all the likely complications. Still, it beats dying.

This was a terrible, terrible movie. It’s basically satisfying on a sci-fi nerdlet level, in which a cool premise is played around with, but on every other level it fails. Badly.

The acting is TV level in everyone but the leads. Gyllenhall and Formiga are appealing, but everyone else makes boring, safe choices. The pretty young thing is pretty damn unbelievable, and seems to be acting like a ‘sassy funny friend’ more than an average, interesting lady. Everything she did felt like she was trying really hard to seem real. The evil scientist guy was terrible, with a comic-booky sneer in his voice.

The script was basically interesting, but everyone is a giant caricature. The evil head scientist who only cares for his project. The nerdy tech guy. The caring, mothering woman at the controls. The plucky young hero who just wants to do the right thing. Nothing interesting about any of them, and nothing tying them together in any interesting ways. Why didn’t the head scientist embody some traits of the father of the young man, so he had to wrestle with his issues with his father, maybe try to please the scientist guy as well as carry out his mission? Why not have him struggle to come to terms with his inability to please his father (or whatever) as well as defuse this bomb thing? Why include the fucking father at ALL?

Oh, because there’s not really a true, cohesive script here, there’s a big pile of maudlin pap injected into the heart of a lean little science fiction story. You get one ending, you fucking chumps, just one, and the one you’re stuck with is the horrible freeze-frame cheese-o-thon. Once you do that one, you can never earn your ‘bad-ass sci-fi ending’ where it’s all real and totally wicked that new realities are created, man (completely breaking the rules already set up earlier, but never mind that). No matter what you do, you can’t earn the ‘bad-ass sci-fi ending’. You lost it when you had the frozen good-looking multiracial train car yukking it up to bad comedy.

What a pile of crap. It’s so disappointing to have a cool premise ruined by substandard writing and execution. The fundamentals are all there; a director who obviously knows how to stage tension, keep up a good pace, and keep an audience guessing, an appealing lead who manages to convey the craziness of his situation as well as his desperation to fix it, and a basic premise that brings up cool ideas about the interactions between multiple worlds and the limits of free will. This all could have worked if the script and director hadn’t chickened out and gone for a hackneyed sell-out version. You can keep your freeze-frame, you fucking hack.

Edit. This guy from NPR gets it:

The last 10 or 15 minutes of Source Code feel like bad studio notes followed to the letter, with all that careful, rigorous sci-fi world-building tossed out and replaced by another lame paean to the transcendent power of free will. (See also: The Adjustment Bureau.) Based on its thrillingly fractured first half — not to mention Moon in its entirety — Jones seems much smarter than he allows the film to be in the end. It wriggles out of its own intriguing puzzle.

The end doesn’t really break the rules we’ve been shown, they only break the rules we were told. The main difference here being that the person telling us the rules may have been wrong.

Anyway, what’s to day that a month or so earlier, after some failed assassination attempt on the president Goodwin didn’t get a text from sone earlier Colter. Eventually everyone will be Colter.

SPOILERS IN THIS POST OK

I thought this movie was great and I actually liked the whole “the realities we create become real” thing because otherwise it didn’t make any sense that he could have memories outside of the train the couple of times he left it. So there’s a reality now where she saw him hit by a train and a reality where they both died by the van and a reality where he stayed and became this new person. I liked how they peppered the dialogue with things explaining it wasn’t time travel, but also with how this was the first time they’d actually done this and so the things that they knew, as we were shown at the end, could be wrong.

I liked that in his last few seconds when he thought that reality was going to “end” that he decided to give the people on the train something to laugh about, considering they’d been blown up in every other reality.

The only thing I didn’t like about the movie was that they absolutely gave away who the bomber was the second time (I’m pretty sure it was the second time) he goes back into the train. The red headed kid picks up the wallet, then we see him, FROM HIS POINT OF VIEW, looking at the ID in the wallet. Why is there any reason for us to shift point of view–which we only do this one time–if not to show us the name and face of the bomber?

Also, Scott Bakula in a cameo? Awesome.