I just want to point out that the Source Code science is very clear that Sean is already dead. Sgt. Coulter is gong in to do a man’s job in a manly way. This includes Getting the Girl™ and Saving the Word™.*
*Not necessarily in that order.
I actually think I would have liked the ending better if after the kiss, the original Sean is back in control of his body. I think the movie sort of makes sense if you assume the source code can somehow set up some kind of quantum-entangled communication between Colter’s brain and Sean-in-a-nearby-reality’s brain. I mean, it’s not possible, but at least it’s consistent. But that communication would end when Colter finally dies in the original timeline.
Maybe I just don’t like ‘happy’ endings.
This is excellent. I was talking to Tom about this the other night and I was mentioning how it seems that in the alternate reality somehow two Captain Colters now exist. Which makes no sense at all.
Your idea here solves that nicely.
-xtien
“How do you know so much?”
You guys are ignoring the Source Code science. You can’t just make wild leaps of faith becuase you don’t like the science! It’s not time travel. It’s a new reality where Colter is lying in a box AND dating the coffee date chick from the train. Shawn is already dead. So is the coffee girl chick and everyone else on the train, except in this one universe everything keeps going becuase Colter and the chick kissed.
You see? You can’t mess with science!
Quantum calculus. Synaptic maps. Photon milk. Red matter.
-TomI like the ending because eventually, after enough accumulated disasters, everyone in one reality will be Captain Colter.
It’s bio-digital jazz, man.
Saw this movie in cinemas and thoroughly enjoyed it, despite many lingering questions (and not lingering in an Inception good way, but in a maybe-plot-hole bad way).
I think it’s clear that the realities the protagonist visits are alternate universes that continue to exist after he leaves them. It’s an interesting question as to whether Source Code creates or just visits them.
If it’s the former, what are the ethical implications in creating a duplicate of our world? Is it “good” to create life? You’re also creating people who will suffer endlessly, eg starving babies in Africa. Does the “good” of creation outweigh the suffering these people will experience? Does the “good” of saving a city in your universe outweigh their suffering? And is creating people who will lead a happy life “good” anyway?
And if it’s the latter, is it really acceptable for the protagonist to go back one final time, and annihilate the consciousness of the man whose body he inhabits? He’s trading one man’s life for his own, even if that man would have died soon after. Or is this the point where you can say “screw it, they’re going to die anyway, I might as well take their bodies and do something good”. Or can you just justify killing the teacher because you’ll save a few thousand other lives?
The idea of created universes persisting after the simulation ends is explored by one of my favourite hard-nosed sci-fi authors: Greg Egan in Permutation City. A simulation is internally cohesive even if the steps of the simiulation are computed in different places around the world. And even if they’re computed out of temporal order (eg with gaps, or in reverse). Given the number of states of matter in this universe, is it really accurate to say a simulation would “stop” when you stop it on a single mere computer on Earth?
Biggest niggle: How protagonist dies on the tracks after exiting the train. This obvious deus ex machina felt more like a higher intelligence and internally inconsistent with the rest of the movie. Especially as he doesn’t die at the exact time the bomb goes off after being shot, he’s still alive to see the fireball. Why then kill him on the tracks at all?
I wasn’t sure whether to post this in the nerd rage thread or here, so… fuck it. Received by someone who was hosting some project files on Mediafire:
The file [redacted] identified by the key (olmunm065ta) has been deleted for a violation of our Terms of Service or our Acceptable Use Policy.
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The specific reason for the removal was:
Dear Sir or Madam: I am writing on behalf of Summit Entertainment, LLC (“Summit”) who holds copyright and/or exclusive distribution rights in “Source Code” There are links on mediafire.com that allow for the transmission and/or downloading of “Source Code”, in violation of Summits’ rights under copyright law. The unauthorized distribution or public performance of copyrighted works constitutes copyright infringement under the Copyright Act, Title 17 U.S Code Section 106(3)-(4). This conduct may also violate the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, The Universal Copyright Convention as well as bilateral treaties with other countries that allow for protection of our copyrighted works even beyond U.S borders. I, the undersigned, swear under penalty of perjury that the information in this Notice is accurate and that I am an agent authorized to act on behalf of the owners of certain intellectual property rights, said owner being Summit (“IP Owner”). I have a good faith belief that the items or materials identified in this notice hereto are not authorized by IP Owner, its agents, or the law and therefore infringe the IP Owner’s rights. We hereby give notice of these activities to you and request that you take expeditious action to remove or disable access to the material described above, and thereby prevent the illegal reproduction and distribution of this movie via your company’s network. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter. Please advise us regarding what actions you take. For your convenience, I have included the links to the infringing content
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Hahaha
Is there a thread for the Source Code podcast? I can’t find it.
I could be wrong, but I thought they yanked him once without him dying in any way. However, I think you’re right in any event, and it was kind of awkward to kill him those ways. It might have been meant to be a hint that life can go on after the 8 minutes, but I am unsure of that.
Also there’s a montage of him jumping several times, so maybe they sort of picked and chose what to show the audience so we wouldn’t get any big ideas.
Uhh, I think that was at a point where I was dallying with the idea of just trying to lump a podcast link into the larger discussion. Which lasted all of one podcast. So, I’m afraid you’ll have to make do with this thread and the comments on the front page. But if you’re trying to knock holes in my weird-ass theory about the ending, that ship has already sailed, taken on water, and sunk to the bottom of the sea. :)
-Tom
Actually I mostly wanted to tell Kelly Wand how hard I laughed at his perfect tagline (and point out that said tagline made moot Dingus’s last minute dismay thinking you’d almost made it through the podcast without a Star Wars reference–that ship had sailed, taken on water, and sunk to the bottom of the sea).
But since you asked so nicely, I’ll also tell you my thoughts about the end of Source Code.
While watching the end of the movie, I too wished they’d ended it at the freeze frame, but afterwards I decided the ending they went with made much more sense, it just wasn’t executed very well.
The whole movie, the handlers are telling Jake that he’s in an unreal simulation of past based on the residual memories in a dead guy’s brain. But Jake is continually observing, “This is much too real to be a simulation!” The reveal that she’s actually communicating with him via text messages reinforces the fact that they have no idea how concrete and vivid his experiences are.
Furthermore, as others have pointed out, he’s finding all kinds of information that wouldn’t be accessible via the memories of anyone whose dead brain was on the train. The only possible way he can get the white van’s license plate is if he is actually accessing a parallel universe that’s nearly identical to our own, most likely one that is identical to ours until it branches at the moment Jake’s consciousness is inserted into Sean.
So the handlers think they’re running a simulation when instead they’re sending Jake into another universe and then pulling him out eight minutes later. So at the very end, it’s not that he creates a new universe by kissing the girl (except in the sense of the Many Worlds hypothesis that every action creates a new universe that branches from all the alternates where you chose a different action). The key point is that by pulling the plug and letting his body die in our universe, Vera prevents the handlers from ever pulling his consciousness back out of that other universe and so he can stay there.
And yeah, apparently every time this happens, other-universe Sean is basically killed, his body usurped by an invader from another universe. I want a sequel, set in the universe Jake ended up in, which is being invaded by an army of body snatchers, a hugely expanded version of Jeffrey Wright’s Source Code project. It starts with Jake meeting Sean’s friends, family, and co-workers. (Okay, that’s a terrible idea, but I still want it to happen.)
They also lose the proof they need to verify that it’s another reality, because the one they are in “resets.” OR DOES IT
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
Who loses proof because which reality resets?
I…well…I have no idea :(
Yet as Colter starts to stray from his mission and find some way to alter his fate, the rules that govern Source Code break down — and the film breaks down with it. The difference between Bill Murray’s situation in Groundhog Day and Gyllenhaal’s situation here is that the Groundhog Day curse is the universe’s way of telling a self-serving, egotistical weatherman to become a better person. Source Code is a piece of science fiction, and while the technology that sends Gyllenhaal back to the same eight minutes may be gimmicky and ludicrous, the logic behind it needs to be consistent.
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.
I’m surprised so many people read the movie like this. The original rules didn’t make any sense at all. I was speculating all along that he was jumping into ‘real’ alternative universes because that was the only way of interpreting the events that made any kind of logical sense for a piece of science fiction.
It helped that science guy kept dropping quantum buzzwords and reiterating that nothing he does will change our timeline – I’d even say the implication is that he knows what’s really going on and he doesn’t care if wrecks a bunch of other universes to find out the data he wants.
A paean about the transcendent power of free will, what?
Shawn is already dead. So is the coffee girl chick and everyone else on the train, except in this one universe everything keeps going becuase Colter and the chick kissed.
It was real all along man. All of the other universes. I too kept thinking about the universe where Christina got off the train and watched him die, or the one where they are shot by the bomber.
It seems that in the alternate reality somehow two Captain Colters now exist. Which makes no sense at all.
How does that not make sense? If you go back in time, even if you go into parallel universe at the same time, they’ll be two of you.
From a QM point of view, I’m not sure there’s much difference between ‘creating’ a universe and jumping into one, since the idea is that at every possible outcome of anything creates a branch of a universe, doing anything at all creates a universe.