A Mind-Bending Sci-Fi Thriller
Stevens (Gyllenhaal), a helicopter pilot, is selected to participate in an experiment to transfer his consciousness into another person’s body in the recent past. The goal of this endeavor is to find out who blew up a passenger train the day before. Stevens will be sent back repeatedly into the last eight minutes of one of the passengers’ lives on the ill-fated express until results emerge.
The Genre’s Struggle
If anything hinders the development of science fiction as a genre, it’s the habit of major studios using it as a smokescreen for entirely different kinds of movies. Even classic sci-fi films often turn out to be Westerns, horror flicks, or thundering adventures with blasters, spaceships, and aliens. Science fiction is a literature of ideas, but it’s believed that when adapted for the screen, viewers shouldn’t be burdened too much. It’s better to film police shootouts on an asteroid or rom-coms with a neurotic girl and a handsome robot than risk getting bogged down in intellectualism. Ridley Scott, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas, considering their contribution to the genre’s formation, are surprisingly cool towards science fiction itself, unlike James Cameron, by the way.
Duncan Jones’s Return
After “Moon” (2009), Duncan Jones established himself as a promising figure in science fiction. In “Source Code,” he returned from the heavens to Earth and began to cultivate a subgenre that had already appeared in cinema more than once. Jake Gyllenhaal’s next project will be David O. Russell’s satire “Nailed,” about a girl who accidentally gets a nail through her head.
The brilliant move with the same eight-minute story (told again and again with an ever-increasing amount of detail that drives the plot) subtly suggests that fate is inevitable, no matter how much you change the circumstances or get closer to the girl you like next to you.
Stellar Performances
Most of the cast consists of actors who have already shown themselves in all their glory. Michelle Monaghan (“Kiss Kiss Bang Bang,” “Eagle Eye”) and Vera Farmiga (“Orphan”) shone in mediocre films (although Farmiga also had “Up in the Air”), but have not yet achieved the well-deserved star status. Both are great in supporting roles, but according to the whimsical laws of science fiction, all the glory invariably goes to the protagonist. Gyllenhaal combines the confusion of “Donnie Darko” with the impenetrability of “Jarhead,” delivering a range from goofy comedy to animal fear. The puzzles of the “who is the terrorist-psychopath” series fade into the background closer to the middle of the film, leaving the hero alone in a dispute with the laws of quantum physics.
Jeffrey Wright’s lame, evil-genius physicist brings the necessary touch of melodrama, and a number of clichés mandatory these days (like a nervous Muslim who turns out to be the first suspect and is therefore simply doomed to be innocent) confidently helps the flywheel of the plot spin. The rush associated with the fact that the suburb of Chicago has less and less time before the terrorist attack limits the number of attempts Stevens can make to go back and change everything, and at the same time provokes his superiors to conceal fatal news so as not to prevent the hero from completing the task. The result is a very organic mixture of a not-so-stupid story with many points of view, the right amount of action (the same explosion again and again), and melodrama (Monaghan and Farmiga).