Most popular entertainment, especially genre material, has more in common with sporting events than art. A sporting event can be engaging, but not challenging. You are not required to do anything but watch it and aside from trying to figure out if your team has been mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, there is no intellectual challenge. There are few surprises and your satisfaction is mainly a product of how well the game was played. And if your team won.
And most genre fare is not even that engaging. (Alien robots can turn themselves into cars. And they fight other alien robots who can also turn themselves into cars. And they’re fighting over a battery.) So when something comes along that actually pulls you into the story, it stands out. And in this case, is pretty outstanding.
Director Duncan Jones made a splash with his feature film debut Moon (2009) and does not disappoint with his follow-up, Source Code. We were first introduced to Jones shortly after his birth as “Zowie Bowie.” (Yes, he is the son of David “Ziggy Stardust” Bowie Duncan droped “Zowie” in his teens). The movie has been described as “Inception meets Groundhog Day” and it has a passing similarity with Denzel’s 2006 movie Déjà Vu, but it actually has most in common with a 1992 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Cause and Effect,” which begins with the Enterprise-D being destroyed before the opening credits and the crew (and viewers) experiencing the events leading up to the destruction over and over again, everybody trying to figure out WTF is going on.
We experience most of Source Code from the point of view Captain Colter Stevens, who awakes disoriented, on a train, talking to a woman he’s never seen before who calls him “Sean.” Before he can fully orient himself the train blows up and he finds himself apparently stuck in one of the helicopters he flew in Afghanistan, talking to a fellow officer via a monitor—and told he has to go back to the train and figure out who set the bomb before it goes off again—in eight minutes.
The engaging part of Source Code is that we know just as much (and as little) as Capt. Stevens; we have to figure out what’s going on right along with him, possessing the exact same information. We have to ask ourselves what we would do if we were in his situation, and when he is manipulated by the people “handling” him, we feel his anger and frustration too. How all this is possible is explained with a bit of technobabble that is just familiar enough, if you watch enough Science Channel, to make you say, “Yeah, they can probably do that” without suspending your disbelief to the breaking point.
Source Code is not as much of a puzzler as Inception—call it but “Inception-lite,” but this is not damning it with faint praise. With much less of a budget, almost no CGI to speak of and pretty much only three locations (the train, the lab, and wherever Capt. Stevens “thinks” he is), it carries you along for an enjoyable ride. It’s old-fashioned movie-making, from a time when filmmakers wanted you to be dazzled by how clever the plot was and not how cool (and loud) the alien robots were.
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