Year:  2011 Country:  United States Studio:  Summit Entertainment Runtime:  1 hr. 34 min. Rated:  PG-13 Directed by:  Duncan Jones Written by:  Ben Ripley Starring:  Jake Gyllenhaal Starring:  Michelle Monaghan Starring:  Vera Farmiga Starring:  Jeffrey Wright Similar Films: 

Inception

Moon

Strange things on a train.

“I aaaaaaam the one and only!” sings Chesney Hawks from a character’s ring tone at semi-regular intervals throughout Source Code. In Duncan Jones’ debut film, Moon, the same line came from an alarm clock and could hardly have been more ironic. In this film, it is anything but. Source Code follows a man living over and over in a world in which he is, for all practical purposes, the only real person. He repeats each short life cycle trying to find truth, and when he does find truth, he realizes he needs something more: meaning

Captain Colter Stevens wakes up in a seat on a train with a woman he doesn’t know. After eight minutes of trying to figure out what is happening, the train blows up, and Stevens wakes harnessed to the inside of a capsule. A woman in uniform is talking to him through a small monitor, urging him to find the man who bombed the train. A moment later he is back on the train. Eight minutes after that, he blows up again and wakes in the capsule. Eventually he learns what is happening: Somehow, through the use of quantum physics, Stevens has been attached to a device that allows him to take the place of the victim of the train bombing, relive the event indefinitely, and freely explore the world as he does so. Anything he finds or discovers while reliving this moment in time is a true recreation of what happened during that eight minutes in the real world. If he finds the bomber, that is the bomber. There are some aspects of this setup that may not make sense – I’m honestly not sure – but when you’re talking quantum physics, what does? It doesn’t so much matter. This is a story about the meaning we create for ourselves and the worlds we create for ourselves. It is also about the worlds that we might unknowingly create.

One of Stevens’ constant struggles through the film is his attempt to convince himself that the people he is seeing and interacting with during these replays of the past are not real. There are times at which he tells the individuals outright that they aren’t real. There are times at which he acts freely, doing whatever he wants. However, there are other times during which he is empathic towards them. There are times when he actively seeks retribution from these dream-like entities. We, like Stevens, know that the people he comes across during these experiences are merely rebuilt from the past. At the same time, though, we have to feel uneasy at some of his actions toward them, including several physical assaults carried out merely because Stevens has a hunch. If someone was in his place in real life, I wonder how free they would feel to act so far outside the bounds of the acceptable, even knowing that none of the world around them is, conventionally speaking, real. Naturally, this brings rise to the extent that something need be real in order to be meaningful. And what does real mean anyway?

Regardless of one’s view of reality, Stevens is clearly leading an isolated existence in this scenario. He is in a world in which, from his perspective, everything is a construct. Even at the times when he accepts the world around him as unauthentic, he abides, for the most part, by its laws. He allows himself to be constrained by it. Even when he refers to others’ unreality when explaining himself, his very doing so reveals the restrictions he feels as a participant in the world around him. Stevens’ inability to fully detach himself from the world may be what allows him to find meaning in it. After discovering the identity of the bomber, Stevens insists on his ability to save the passengers from the bomb, even though those running the operation repeatedly explain to him that his actions during these eight-minute replays of time can have no effect on the real world, in which, of course, the bombing has already occurred. He refuses to listen. His desire to save these recreations of people exemplifies our ability to attach meaning to the meaningless. Real or not, these people are endowed with meaning and value by the very fact that Stevens feels for them. Because of this, to save them is the same as saving a real life. To let them die, for this character, would be unthinkable.

Source Code’s final question is whether certain actions (in this case, a sly email sent from the time-replay) can spawn worlds of their own. This is a valid question but one that is given more weight than is perhaps warranted. It may be true, in some metaphysical or multi-universal sense, that other timelines play out with various actions that never took place in our world. By extension, it may also be true that we can create impossible worlds simply by attempting the impossible. However, even if this is the case, such worlds or timelines would have no way of interacting with our world and would thus be irrelevant. Jones cannot resist bringing up this question, even though it is unanswerable and ultimately inconsequential. Still, this question is infinitely more interesting than films that strive only to entertain through simple reiterations of accepted truths, and its focus is not heavy enough to distract from the film’s more immediate concerns.

There are times at which the audience will be one or two steps ahead of Source Code, as it is occasionally unsuccessful at hiding revelations that affect our understanding of the movie. However, this is in no way fatal to the film. Though the main character here is attempting to solve a mystery, Source Code rarely steps foot in the mystery genre. Instead, it is happy to analyze its main character from every angle while he lives through an existence that becomes more complex the more we learn about it (and more complex than I have revealed in this review). At the same time, Source Code is not here to be so audacious as to try to teach us something. It is here to ask questions. That is often a higher calling than we realize.

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