Source Code

Stars:****

Its science may be woozy,and its ending hopelessly optimistic,but if there’s one thing going for Source Code that makes you look above and beyond its brief story,it’s Jake Gyllenhaal.

He is Captain Coulter Stevens,a Special Forces guy,deployed in the 17th Airborne Division,Afghanistan,who last remembers being on a mission outside Kandahar but now wakes up to find himself in a downtown train to Chicago,sitting opposite a pretty woman. The woman (Monaghan) knows him as Sean,and keeps striking a conversation even as he is trying to evade her. Concerned,she follows him to the rest room. As she is holding him and telling him,”Everything will be all right”,the train blows up.

Coulter wakes up again,this time in a small cubicle with just a computer monitor,and a woman on the other side,trying to stir his memory. She is fellow armed forces officer Goodwin (Farmiga). As he demands answers,she reluctantly and in pieces tells him that he is on that train as part of “Source Code” — a project that uses the eight-minute memory span that remains imprinted on a person’s brain after his death. Sean was one of the passengers on that train,and as part of his mission,Coulter will be sent back repeatedly on that train,for eight minutes every time,to find out the bomber so that they can stop him from what threaten to be further attacks.

Following different leads every time,Coulter makes slow but steady progress. As he asks more questions,Goodwin and the Source Code inventor (the man in-charge) make it clear that Coulter’s brief isn’t to stop the bombing. For,Source Code isn’t about altering the past (“those people are already dead”) but trying to change the future.

However,every time Coulter wakes up and spots the woman on the seat opposite him,whose name he discovers is Christina,he grows more and more attached. Source Code has been compared to Groundhog Day,and this is quite an accomplished performance. Gyllenhaal puts not just real warmth and growing pain into what is a doomed connection,but in the few conversations he shares about his unit and particularly his Dad,between being blown up and waking up in an alternate world,you get a clear idea of the man before he “became” Sean.

Director Duncan Jones,the son of singer David Bowie,makes equally good use of Monaghan,who has to work her way through different scenarios with basically the same few lines. The always-good Farmiga,as an officer with a conscience whose hands are tied,round up a film that shows why a sci-fi thriller with real brains can also have a heart.