It’s by Duncan Jones (née Zowie Bowie) the guy who did moon.
It’s got plenty of brains, and an original concept… if you haven’t seen Deja Vu. It pretty much seems like Duncan saw that movie, and thought “I can do so much more with that premise.”
And he did.
Like I said, it’s got brains. It’s puzzly. So if you dug Inception and/or Limitless, you’re probably going to like this.
Though in a case of fridge logic, nobody cares about what happened to the teacher who had his brains fried.
As to the ending
Well, I suppose in the reality where the bomb goes off, the teacher is dogfood anyway. I was more concerned about the soldier’s new life, he’s going to have problems once he realises he knows nothing about his job, and has no memories of his new friends and familily. This may be a classic example of the tacked-on happy ending we were talking about in this thread. Is it a better film if the train bomb is irrevocable and the soldier is simply allowed to die with dignity?
I’m with you guys. Fairly entertaining movie, but big problems with the ending
What happened to the teacher’s consciousness, and what happens to the big romance when the girl (and I never saw that actress before but OMFG she is so gorgeous that I don’t even care how big her tits are) realizes that she doesn’t even know this guy?
We just saw it today, and it was quite good. (Can we do away with the spoilers, since the title of this thread is “Seen it”?) We sat down and drew timelines after watching it, to try to figure out how it went. We figured that each time Captain Blue Eyes went back to the eight minutes before the train blew up, he was creating a new universe. His text that made it to Goodwin in the end was sent in the last universe that he created in his last jump, but I’m still having trouble figuring out how that one seemed to go to not only a new universe but also back in time.
ETA: It also occurred to us to wonder what had happened to the teacher’s (Fentress’) consciousness. It was one thing to plug a new consciousness into an existing brain that had only eight minutes to live, but to hijack his whole life? Not cool. We wondered if it might be like the way demons ride humans in “Supernatural,” with the humans aware of everything that’s going on with their bodies but with no control of anything.
It didn’t go back in time. He sent it in the universe where the bomb never went off. When she got the text, they were just finding out that a bombing had been thwarted in Chicago. It was back in time for the main universe, but for his universe it was in the future.
So each trip back to the eight minutes on the train created a new universe?
Basically. Now the big question is, is there still a universe for all those trips back? Or did they end every time Coulter got pulled back?
I had a lot of problems with the movie. I’ll repost my comments from that thread, since my memory has faded some:
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.
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.
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.
You didn’t understand the premise. [spoiler]He wasn’t reliving the dude’s memories. He was, because of the “source code”, shifting his consciousness to what they thought was a simulation of the events using quantum weirdness to explore a universe exactly the same as the “real one” at the start but diverging for up to eight minutes.
The dude was chosen because the hero’s consciousness was a good fit for his and presumably the “source code” finds it easier to place close fits.
As it happens the code wasn’t actually a simulation, it either created or allowed transport to universes that were the same up to the events on the train.[/spoiler]
If they were different universes, then any information he got from them should have been useless to the one he was based in.
I think that is exactly Diogenes’ point, if I’m understanding him. They built this fantastic facility, and it turned out not to work at all like they thought, but just by accident it turned out to create multiple universes. And just by accident, nobody had a clue that it wasn’t working exactly as specified until the end of the film, because just by accident JG died after 8 minutes on every trip back. If he wasn’t blown up on the train, he was kicked into the path of the freight train he saved, or he was shot by the bomber.
I’m more forgiving of Diogenes for the inconsistency of that, since the whole thing was kind of preposterous. What bothers me is what happens five minutes after the film ends, when the girl realizes that she doesn’t know this man, and the guy realizes that he doesn’t know anything about the teacher’s life except he’s friends with the girl, and the teacher himself is evidently SOL.
[spoiler]The universes were identical until the hero arrived and started them diverging. The thought was that the “source code” let’s them explore all the possible quantum branching from the moment he arrives. Since the starting point is the same, the same dude had constructed the bombs in every universe.
So the tech of the film allows them to lock onto the universe as it was eight minutes before a corpses death, then they can send back a compatible subject and he can explore that moment onward via sic-fi quantum fuzziness.[/spoiler]
The whole thing is pretty creepy when you think about it.
If he can take over the teacher’s body and then presumably live out the rest of his life, then that machine is going to be pretty popular.
Dick Cheney can use it to take over Barack Obama’s body (the “compatibility” issue will just take a little more refinement in the process), and start torturing people again. And when the home models become available, I can use it to take over LeBron James’s body. I think my first stop will be Serena Williams’s house.
It will be the ultimate acid trip. And since you apparently have to die in the “real” world to make it permanent, a lot of people will do just that. And probably when they get tired of being Bill Gates or Charlie Sheen, they’ll repeat the process in their new universe to become somebody else in a third universe.
Weird.
Well, except for the fact that the person has to die for you to be able to access them. And it’s also implied that the Source Code may only work for Colter. And no one knows that once Colter died he continued on in the other universe.
Most of what you say is based on what the scientists thought at the beginning of the movie. But a lot of what they thought they knew about the process turned out to be wrong.
I’m intrigued, but, how to watch the movie? It isn’t in the theater (not in my area anyway) and it doesn’t appear to be released on DVD yet.
Yeah, but none of what I’ve said was disproved.
[spoiler]
In the movie, Colter thought it was important for Captain Goodwin to allow him to die at the end, for him to not be pulled back. I can’t recall now if in the movie they ever had him not die until the very last time through.[/spoiler]
We just watched it in a second run theatre. Do you have any of those nearby?
Not any that are running the movie. According to Moviefone, I’d have to travel 90 miles to see it. Guess I’ll wait for the DVD. Thank you.