Source Code is fantastic! (boxed spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

I saw the midnight showing of Source Code last night because I just couldn’t stand the thought of being spoiled and I’m glad I did. Besides it being a cracking good movie, fast-paced, interesting, moving (and not just on a fast train), sometimes humorous, and thought-provoking, there’s so much more to it than the previews show, which made me very happy. I hate trailers that give away everything. Source Code is not one of those trailers, though I’d been sorry I even saw a trailer, because it would have been fun to go in knowing zero about it. It’s nowhere near as complicated as Inception, but IMO they belong on the same shelf, Smart SF thrillers. Neither are hard SF, but they’re not fluff either.

The acting is very good, Jake and Michelle have perfect chemistry and make you care about their characters. Vera Farmiga does a good job, though Jeffrey Wright didn’t have much to do.

Duncan Jones is one of my new favorite directors. He directed my favorite film from a couple of years ago, Moon, with Sam Rockwell. He’s got the gift, and his career is going to be thrilling to watch. I hope Source Code is a hit and more people seek out Moon.

Oh my, does Jones make Chicago look gorgeous!

I don’t want to say anything spoilery now, but would ask that others use boxed spoilers if talking about a plot point.

2

The trailer looks pretty bad, but the reviews are good.

I’m worried that it will be like The Adjustment Bureau all over again where a perfectly good premise is wrecked by turning it into a “love conquers all” story."

I’ll probably see it tonight, but I expect to be disappointed. Dialogue from the trailer like, “I’d make those seconds count” does not make me very optimistic. Also, JG kind of blows as an actor.

3

I haven’t seen any trailers and don’t know anything except I saw John Stewart’s interview with Gyllenhaal and it looked really interesting. I’ll have to try to see it before I accidentally get spoiled - maybe I can sneak to the theater on Sunday.

Not coming back to this thread until I’ve seen it.

4

Please watch spoilers for The Adjustment Bureau. I saw 64 movies in the theater in March* but that wasn’t one of them. I hope to see it this coming week.

Edit to add:

  • that’s because of the month-long European Union Film Festival at the Gene Siskel Film Center. I saw 52 EUFF films and 12 non-EUFF films. I tried to see TAB but a pass I wanted to use was expired and I didn’t have the cash on me.
5

Do yourself a favor and skip TAB. The ending is terrible.

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No, I won’t be skipping it, I’ve been looking forward to it for a long time and I like Matt Damon and Emily Blunt. I’ll judge for myself.

7

I won’t spoil, but agree that the ending will be somewhat of a letdown.

BTW, I am sort of interested in Source Code, but the reviews make it sound like Ground Hog Day: The Terrorist Rodent

Does that same 8 minute situation simply play over and over and over again, or is there something else in between? I sort of hate films that keep showing the same thing over many times (although Run Lola Run! was an exception and quite good…).

8

Lola Rennt was very good the first 2 or 3 times you watched it. My German teacher combined “watching movies with is a great way to learn a language” and “I love the shit out of Lola Rennt.” It gets old after 3, it gets mind numbing after 7. shudder

Die Tasche
Die Tasche
Die Tasche
Die Tasche
Die Tasche
Stop!

No, seriously, stop, it’s annoying.

9

No, just as 127 Hours doesn’t spend 2 hours showing a guy cut his arm off. Some aspects play multiple times, especially after he first wakes up on the train and a couple times after, but then he uses each 8-minute segment to find clues to the bomber. It’s very clever how the editing makes every entry into the train seem fresh and interesting, after his grogginess and wtf?ness wears off.

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I refuse to go see it because from what I can tell from the trailer it’s not actually about source code.

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Just got back. Very good movie and very hard to talk about without spoiling. The trailer is pretty misleading in the way that it looks like “Groundhog Day with Terrorist.” I would say the movie is fairly evenly split between what happens in the “loops” and what happens outside them.

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Quantum Leap meets Groundhog Day

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I’d describe it as “Jake Gyllenhaal fights terrorists, WITH THE POWER OF SAVE-SCUMMING!!”

Better than it sounds. Though the RPG analogy is kind of hard to avoid. The setup could have worked equally well for a game.

The friend I saw it with used the same Quantum Leap/Groundhog Day analogy. Which vaguely irritated me for some reason. Honestly, I think SF movies are held up to a truly impossible standard these days.

Anyway, I liked it.

So, Source Code is dropping Jake into alternate worlds, then yanking him back when his times up. That’s fine. That means every variant he went through was an actual alternate world. That’s fine, too. But, that also means that, by having them NOT yank him back, Jake deliberately bodyjacked the poor bastard he’d been jumping into.

–
Though Scott Bakula is in it, so maybe the comparison is more fair than usual.

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It was Assassin’s Creed is what it was.

I thought it was decidely meh. The premise was, of course, preposterous, but you can overlook that with sci-fi as long as it’s internally consistent. The problem with this movie was that it didn’t follow its own logical rules. None off it made sense, and the ending was especially nonsensical. I guess I’ll have to box this:

[spoiler]So the hero is basically a brain in a jar (I know he has a torso, but functionally he’s a brain in a jar) who is supposed to be experiencing the last 8 minutes of memories of this dude that got blown up on a train (how they got the other dude’s brain after it was blown up, they don’t explain), but it’s not any kind of reality. it’s just the other dude’s memories. If that’s the case, then how can he get up and explore the train and see things that the other dude didn’t see and could therefore have no memory of? They keep talking about these vicarious memories in terms of being “in the source code,” which is an incorrect use of that phrase, is never really defined, seems to have no rules. The characters will say it has rules, but then the rules turn out not to really hold, and no explanation is given for why they don’t. The movie just basically plays Calvinball with its own premise in order to give the audience a happy crappy romantic ending.

And speaking of the happy crappy romance, that in itself makes no sense, and JG’s behavior towrds the chick is actually sort of creepy and predatory. Supposedly she thinks he’s really this other dude that she’s had a crush on for a long time, so essentially he’s committing a fraud on her by pretending to be that person. It’s also stupid and insulting to expect the audience to believe that he would decide this chick was his soulmate after like 20 seconds of small talk, but movies have always perpetrated that lie, what really stretches credulity is that movie expects us to believe he’s just going to step into this other dude’s life and pick up where he left off, despite not knowing a single thing about him. How is he going to relate to this guy’s parents, friends and coworkers now? He’s supposed to be a teacher, but how is he going to be able to do that job?

Also, whathappened to the dead dude who’s life he leaped into if the train didn’t really blow up? That would mean he isn’t dead now, so what the fuck?

Also, if JG is experiencing that dude’s memories, why isn’t he experiencing all of them? Why doesn’t he know what his own name is supposed to be, or who the chick is?

There was so much wrong with this screenplay, I wanted to take notes. I haven’t even mentioned the ridiculous mad scientist character by by Jeffrey Wright.[/spoiler]

Superficially, the movie is well produced and manages to create some momentum and watchability while you’re watching it, but you can’t start thinking about it at all, or the whole thing falls apart. Plus the ending is a copout. I don’t understand the good reviews for this movie.

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The movies follows its own rule just fine, it’s just that the rules aren’t understood until the end.

I was confused at first on how he could go and see everything on the train if it was just his memories. But the ending resolved that with the fact that it’s a whole alternate reality inside the Source Code. Scientist guy doesn’t fully understand how the whole things works (notice how it’s only been running for two months, and the bomb on the train was the first real test), and he’s only telling Colter some of what he knows. We see the story mainly from Colter’s point of view, and he’s only getting a quarter of the story.

16

All the previews show buildings on the college campus where I work, so I guess I’ll have to see it, no matter what.

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[spoiler]This still doesn’t work because the “source code” reality was built solely from teacher dude’s memories, so there’s still no way he could find the bomb and whatnot.

Also his last leap changes the starting reality, so it can’t just be some kind of alternate, dream state thing or whatever.[/spoiler]

18

Well, I suppose the ending is up to some interpretation but I saw it as:

[spoiler]In the “real” world that train blew up, but the bomber was stopped. Now there is a parallel world existing inside the Source Code in which the train never blew up.

And I don’t remember if they actually said that the reality was built just from the memories of one guy. It was just that his memories were the best ones for Jake to “jump” into. [/spoiler]

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[Spoiler]The builders THOUGHT it was a simulated, short term alternate reality, recreated by crossing the streams of quantum physics technobable and Frankensteinesqe metaphysics.

It turned out they were mistaken, and every time he went back, he was creating, or jumping into, an ACTUAL alternate version of the past. So the ‘real world’ had the train crash happen but the dirty bomb stopped, and Jake dead in the lab. The ‘Good Ending’ universe had neither happen, and 2 copies of Jake, one in the teacher body he stole, and one in the remains of his old body.

Or possibly, the scientist guy knew, he just didn’t care/hadn’t considered the ramifications/wanted to take advantage of it in THIS universe. Every time Jake pointed out things had changed, Scientist Guy didn’t argue that Jake was only changing virtual data, he argued that nothing that had changed could affect the ‘real world.’ Which it didn’t.

Presumably, all the other jumps back also resulted in alternate universes, which probably continued on after Jake died or his 8 minutes were up. So there’s at least one other version of the Chick who survived, in the Racial Profiling universe. Though she was probably killed by the dirty bomb later, knowing her luck.

Now, one could argue that a BETTER ending would have been having the alternate universe peter out without the code to hold it together, (dying on his own terms) or to have Jake’s personality fade away after saving the day, leaving Teacher Guy and the Chick to run off to India together, (setting right what once went wrong) either of which would have avoided the whole bodynapping thing. [/spoiler]

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I like what William Gibson said on Twitter: