Source Code is Miles Better than Tenet

 

SOURCE CODE (2011)

Directed by Duncan Jones

Summit Entertainment, 93 minutes, PG-13

★★★★

 

 

 

On February 15, I slammed Tenet as both junk science and a rotten movie. Lots of movies engage in junk—or if we wish to be polite, speculative—science and it’s possible to make a decent flick using it. I recently came across Source Code, a 2011 science fiction//action/thriller offering that does so very well.

 

If, like me, this film simply slipped off your radar screen, here’s a brief synopsis. Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) has been given a mission whose mechanics he can’t understand. He is inside of something that he presumes to be an experimental machine and is told by Captain Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) he is being sent into to an unfolding event in which there is a bomber aboard a commuter train bound for Chicago. In order to avoid a major catastrophe, he will have 8 minutes to identify and neutralize an on-board bomber. He barely has time to sputter before he is spun and jolted out of his capsule and finds himself sitting across from an attractive young woman, Christina Warren (Michelle Montaghan) who knows him as Sean Fentress. He’s confused and who wouldn’t be? Who is this woman and how does one find a bomber amidst a car filled with commuters?  How do you do process gazing into a bathroom mirror at a face that isn’t yours? In 8 minutes, not much. The train blows up in a fiery ball that kills everyone aboard.

 

Suddenly, Stevens is again in the capsule. Goodwin tells Stevens his mission has failed and she is sending him back again. Before he can sputter, “Wait!” he’s thrust back and the same scenario unfolds. This occurs several times and in each trip back he picks up clues and is drawn closer to Christina. But it doesn’t take long before the befuddled Stevens knows that something very weird is happening and demands answers. He is given just information from Goodwin’s superior, Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright), and is sent back to avert a crisis, though he does learn it’s not necessarily the one he thinks. Stevens also has reasons to think he is actually dead and is only “alive” inside a computer program.

 

This beat-the-clock thriller works because it uses some actual science to mask its pseudo-science. We know that in some individuals, brain waves can be detected as long as 10 minutes after clinical death has occurred. What this actually means is anyone’s guess, but brief postmortem delta waves do exist. The junk science part of the equation is that no one has actually built any sort of time machine and even if they had, the principle of uniformatarianism would make it impossible to alter an event that has already occurred. But here is where Source Code succeeds and Tenet failed. The latter film’s unending volleys of jargonistic nonsense call attention to its contrivances, whereas Source Code uses science­­-–delta waves—to divert attention from not actually explaining how anyone can be sent back in time numerous times. To put it glibly, our deus ex machina protagonist makes us not “see” the machine.

 

Source Code sometimes slides from thriller to sentimental fluff, but this too is a matter that is easily overlooked because, well, Gyllenhaal and Monaghan make a wicked cute couple. Wright’s Rutledge probably could have benefitted from being more nuanced and less Dr. Frankenstein. He stands in marked contrast to Farmiga as Goodwin. In many ways, hers is the most difficult role in the film, as she is called upon to decide between her orders and her moral center.

 

Source Code is sci-fi and if that’s not your genre, it won’t be the film to make you reconsider. If you do like sci-fi, though, I’d say that this 93-minute $32 million film beats the plutonium out of Christopher Nolan’s bloated 150-minute $200 million Tenet.

 

Rob Weir