Back to the future? As a plot artifice here it’s a surefire suspense stimulant.
Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhall) has to save the world in eight minutes, and has to do it over until he gets it right. Sound familiar?
The device is akin to the brilliant Run Lola Run, which gave it’s loops 20 minutes for a goal much less ambitious but equally important to it’s protagonist. Adding another layer of suspense in this 94-minutes-lean, incredibly tight-paced thriler, is Stevens’ gradual realization of his own personal state of being. Flopped back and forth between the 8-minute train ride adventures and rest periods in a confining pod (nicely shot with a Red digital camera), he comes to wonder, How did I get in another person’s body, and what the hell am I doing here?
Vera Farmiga to the rescue. From some sort of mission control, she’s both lifeline and barrier to his discovery process. Jeffrey Wright plays her driven boss, who’s even less forthcoming. Gylenhall exhibits kinds of exuberance and vibrancy which are dynamic and incisive. Here he’s noticably grown into a major lead actor. Farmiga (Up In The Air, The Depated, the underrated Down To The Bone) is her customary excellent, and Michelle Monaghan is very good in a tricky role.
Is the ending a tad too arbitrary? At a post-screening Q & A, director Duncan Jones after querying the audience on whether the ending was confusing, actually explained elements of the denouement. While it clarified things, his feeling the need for such an explanation was itself unsettling.
Not to worry. Source Code’s the real deal. Jones (son of David Bowie) has amazingly arrived as a top-notch director after two feature films. The film, despite it’s premise, manages to pull off feeling grounded not is some forsaken and fantastic future, but in the all-too-real, eerie present. It’s quite a delectable film–as dressy, flaky and brutal as Stevens’ outrageous mission itself.
9 loops out of 10