By Jose Zuniga
In the film “Source Code,” directed by Duncan Jones, scientists invented a form of sustained time-travel, which glues the viewer’s eyes to the screen in this edge-of-your-seat thriller.
After a deadly incident in Afghanistan, Captain Colter Stevens, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, is chosen to be the test subject of this unusual experiment.
In order to anticipate and halt a future terrorist attack, a mysterious company sends Gyllenhaal back in time using a government program called the Source Code.
He is to be sent into a train that is going to explode in eight minutes.
He suddenly appears in a passenger’s body confused about how he came to be on a Chicago-bound commuter train.
The train blows up and kills him, but he returns to the source code bin where he awaits orders and is sent back in time yet again.
This happens often, as Stevens is more concerned with his own past than finding the terrorist for an organization he never heard about.
The movie is exceptional in that it has no intermingling side-stories.
It stays on the path of trying to find the terrorist and Stevens reliving eight minutes of another person’s life over and over again.
Jones did a good job of fading out to the future after each of the train explosions to avoid confusion between the past and future.
Michelle Monaghan also stars in this film as Christina Warren, Stevens’s love-interest.
Conflicted between the terrorist’s next attack and his host body’s girlfriend, Stevens often looks for a loophole in his eight minutes to, not only arrest the terrorist, but save the people in the train.
Aside from this, problems within the source code organization draws further interest from the audience.
Since the movie is fairly straightforward, not a lot of it is spent on unnecessary scenes that would have made the movie drag on.
It covers the theme of death versus love well and has a well-rooted and heart-wrenching message about the relationships that people hold dear when they are about to die.
This sentiment is summed up when Stevens often asks, “What would you do if you only had ten seconds to live?”
The film draws audiences in with this twisted world of fate manipulation.
Stevens carries out his mission but has a different agenda to escape his recurring eight-minute nightmare.
Apparently, being blown up in a train over and over causes an enormous amount of pain.
On top of all of this, Stevens is still faced with the fact that the company is withholding information about what happened to him in Afghanistan.