SOURCE CODE directed by Duncan Jones, starring Jake Gyllenhaal

Seeing this tomorrow lunchtime, and I'm rather excited.

The great trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NkTrG-gpIzE

Jake's on a Train!?

teal & orange overload

(looks good, though)

i enjoyed this and am miffed my review won't be out till may, lol dead tree media

surprised by the respectful reviews, but then again I thought Zowie Jones's Moon was a little overpraised.

yeah i thought moon was overpraised, and this definitely doesn't deserve the five stars it's had from the guardian

this looks like philip k dick lite, but moon was great, so maybe it's good? probably not though.

http://www.accesshollywood.com/content/images/22/400x400bd/22930_jake-gyllenhaal-takes-on-effies-big-number-from-dreamgirls-on-saturday-night-live.jpg

Surprised it's getting raves when it looks like Quantum Leap + Groundhog Day - Any Humor Whatsoever

Yeah, I was willing to give this a go considering how much I liked Moon, but the TV trailers have looked awful and I keep being reminded of that awful Ryan Phillipe computer movie Antitrust.

I do like the train exploding scene filmed at IIT. I've actually been to several meetings in the building in the background.

seriously thought that was maggie gyllenhaal in the trailer.

I really hate his guts now. I'm over him.

And you thought you couldn't quit him.

You are too much for me, Jake Gyllenhaal.

Thoroughly enjoyed this last night. Will blog it later.

way to participate

entertaining movie, very short -- very much lite Inception meets 12 Monkeys.

need to start that Certified Copy thread

i thought this was pretty good! the final stretch is a little bumpy i guess, but it was really involving. jeffrey wright!

preview for this really put me off of it. I thought Moon was okay, gave it points for inventiveness but it tripped up on some of the execution. sooo this is a maybe...

is Jake nude in this?

now that i think back, briefly, yes

Quite enjoyable. My buddies weren't terribly impressed, though.

*MILD SPOILERS*

Best part was probably midway through, when Jeffrey Wright is about to explain how/what Source Code is, before essentially saying, "fuck it, there's math involved."

very much lite Inception meets 12 Monkeys

God, no, ahead of either (unless you meant lite as better). This was a cute B movie, more like Groundhog Day meets Frankenheimer paranoia, except obv the tragic endings favored by Frankenheimer are simply not permitted in commercial thrillers anymore. (ie, the ending sucked)

Jeffrey Wright was amusing doing a 2-steps-short-of-Strangelove villain, but can't he get a non-superficial film role, for once?
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SPOILERS
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So wtf happened to the teacher's consciousness in the film's end 'reality'? Just displaced by a movie star?

yeah i brought that up in my review. the girl likes the guy, but that guy's soul/spirit/consciousness disappears? and she doesn't notice anything except he's more confident. film doesn't do anything with the implications of that, doesn't even raise them. i liked it enough though.

just watched this

not exactly termite art is it

So wtf happened to the teacher's consciousness in the film's end 'reality'? Just displaced by a movie star?

to be fair his not-movie-star consciousness was going to get him blown up anyway.

i may have missed something: but how does rooting around in someone's short term memory produce NEW information?

IIRC they weren't just rooting through memory, they were using this guy as a vessel to port into alternate/parallel universes at the same instant.

oh ok, i must have spaced out when that was explained. it was bugging the crap out of me!

the imdb synopsis is pretty clear:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0945513/synopsis

timey wimey, basically

honestly, i don't think it was made all that clear in the movie--maybe some of the exposition was insufficiently redundant, or maybe i wasn't paying enough attention?

the implication of the ending is like a literalization of solipsism--that each new consciousness is its own "reality" with an independent existence and trajectory. no? it seemed a rather, um, sweeping way to engineer a happy ending. also i felt the way chicago was used as shorthand was kind of sloppy.

i mean in a lot of ways this was ingenious and at least it wasn't terribly bloated, but for me it was kinda close but no cigar.

but I like the way there's a lot of troubling implications and lingering questions too. like, are they generating new realities or just tapping into other existing ones?

i think the implication is that they are GENERATING new realities which is kind of like the ultimate mind-bending extension of the hollywood happy-ending ethos.

close but no cigar.

yeah i've probably said this upthread but it missed really getting into hitchcockian identity-questioning territory

there's not much drama if 'in some parallel dimension' everything worked out ok

but i don't think that matters so much as this question of: mm digs the schoolteacher, jake replaces the schoolteacher, she's none the wiser. the implications of that are interesting but they don't get into it one bit. iirc.

i only watched the middle half of this movie, but it seemed to be firmly in the 'reality from collective memory' not 'reality of parallel dimension' camp. did they do some kind of switcheroo at the end?

yeah i thought there was something kind of exasperating about how there were all these profoundly weird implications to what was happening that were barely explored. in that sense it felt kind of dumb-smart you know?

xpost

i think they fudged the difference between those two things, but yeah while watching i was thinking it was meant to be the former

I don't remember the parallel dimension stuff being supported by the film at all, it seemed very much the memory thing (which I though suxxored, too many holes, too hand-wavey).

there's not much drama if 'in some parallel dimension' everything worked out ok

doesn't it lurk right in plain sight that the 1000 times he tried it and blew up are all real too?

but yeah, doesn't really say much about the schoolteacher does it. i figured he was boring! or i figured the jake-moment kind of gooses the guy into acting and it's still really him afterwards -- was half expecting it would be his face you see in that chrome sculpture.

iirc the movie kind of jokes to you how badly it is explaining its core conceit

*MILD SPOILERS*

Best part was probably midway through, when Jeffrey Wright is about to explain how/what Source Code is, before essentially saying, "fuck it, there's math involved."

― Simon H. Shit (Simon H.), Tuesday, April 5, 2011 1:09 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark

Yeah, it was around that point I just gave up trying to figure it out myself, and enjoyed the rest of the movie all the better for it.

Mixed feelings about the happy ending though, it probably would've been better if he'd just died.

Also he's going to have to be a teacher now with no training at all.

"dumb-smart" is a great summation of this movie. the viewer ends up being more curious about the world of the movie than the movie itself is! that's sort of rare I think.

he did die, presumably, if it holds to the collective memory conceit. he'll fade away as the corpses' neurons degrade.
or there will be funky after-effects like cars turning into bananas. sounds like a hilarious setup for a will farrell sequel.

I was only curious about it while I was watching it. It didn't linger (unlike Inception, say).

inception didn't linger for me either, except in its pomposity

the big DERRRRRRP sound lingered

OK, Inception wasn't great, but they did more interesting things with their premise, esp. structurally, than this did.

no

idk, they're both ok. some of 'source code' is mad cheesy. and 'inception' has tom hardy in impeccable suits nh.

i guess i'd but source code ahead of inception just for the relative lack of bombast. i can't say i've thought about inception once since the week i saw it.

I want this to be better than Inception. Is Jake naked in it?

kind of, yeah

difficult to answer w/o spoilers

is Jake nude in this?

― Hey Look More Than Five Years Has Passed And You Have A C (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, April 5, 2011 12:25 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

now that i think back, briefly, yes

― goole, Tuesday, April 5, 2011 12:30 PM (3 months ago) Bookmark

haha

Out tomorrow on DVD.

this was really good. although, what happened to the guy who he replaced in the afterlife at the end?

oh morb wondered the same thing.

he grows into an extra head, sequel forthcoming

This was a cute B movie, more like Groundhog Day meets Frankenheimer paranoia, except obv the tragic endings favored by Frankenheimer are simply not permitted in commercial thrillers anymore. (ie, the ending sucked)

This really sums up how I felt about this movie. I quite liked it until the end. Then it really started losing my interest. :-(

Accurate depiction of Metra.

For three-quarters, not bad at all, and preferable to Moon. The Jake-Farmiga scenes, where his eyes are so comically large they're like a special effect, are the best.

yeah i brought that up in my review. the girl likes the guy, but that guy's soul/spirit/consciousness disappears? and she doesn't notice anything except he's more confident. film doesn't do anything with the implications of that, doesn't even raise them.

history mayne otm too

I assume that he spins off a new timeline/parallel universe in that last trip (and all the other trips--it's just that he keeps on living in the last one), so the original universe where everyone on train dies still exists, as does the one where he completes his mission and is turned off, as does the new one at the end--implied by all the quantum hand-waving talk

The Jake-Farmiga scenes, where his eyes are so comically large they're like a special effect, are the best.

Yeah, she's way better than the script or movie in any way required her to be. I just watched this tonight (I was on the library waiting list for the DVD), and enjoyed it with obvious caveats. I liked how stripped-down it was, narratively. The ending was predictable from about halfway through, when he (SPOILER) gets into the argument with Wright about whether he can affect "reality" or not.

It makes me wonder a little why other movies haven't done more with the Groundhog Day set-up. You can use it for anything: comedy, thriller, romance, probably musicals if you wanted.

I was enjoying the throwback style score, so I looked up the composer and his name is Chris P. Bacon.

Diverting, I guess. Not sure if I'm supposed to stop and try to figure out anything beyond the most basic threads; if I am, I'm not up to it. Just watched Deja Vu last week. This, that, Inception, Looper, 12 Monkeys, and (maybe, because it would win too handily) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind should be polled. Anything else relatively recent that fits?

"plot threads" that should read.

Primer, that is essential watching if you are on this type of mission.

uh! it isn't recent, sorry.

Knowing is another one that is pure schlock, but matches your criteria. Not a bad film really.

Primer's 2004, so that's recent enough. Just looked up Knowing, and that fits. Films that involve reshaping or correcting events that have already happened.

the scene where he bings himself only gets funnier with time

Knowing is hysterically awful, except for the actual scenes of mass destruction and the awesome score.

The Butterfly Effect!

In the director's cut of the movie, Ashton Kutcher takes himself to where his mother was going in to labor, and strangles himself in her womb.

lol still my favorite alternate ending ever.

ha yeah me too
these movies are my favourite kind of movies! There must be more?

xp yup, i love that ending

There is an excellent Spanish movie called Timecrimes which is more in the vein of Primer, it is about a clusterfuck that occurs when someone travels back in time an hour.

^concur with that recommendation, though it's less heady and more pulpy/to the point than Primer imo

ah yeah Timecrimes is good. don't be put off by the dvd cover

Timecrimes was awesome! It's like Primer made by someone who actually knows how to make movies. (And yeah, it's less heady than Primer, but IMO it's a sign of good writing that it manages to explore the same themes without the viewer needing to watch it four times to get what's happening onscreen.)

Knowing is not a good movie if you think about it too much, but it's very, very entertaining, and looks gorgeous. Definitely one of those movies whose ridiculous over-the-topness makes up for their flaws.

Two other good & recent movies that deal with predestination, and whether you can change the future that you know is gonna happen: Happy Accidents, and Stranger Than Fiction. They're both in the Eternal Sunshine vein, in that they're more about character drama (what does knowing the future do to the protagonist?) than about the sci-fi/fantasy device.

Another Earth just scrapes in I think. Also much more about the characters, the changing the past angle is kind of a central theme but somewhat incidental to the plot.

it's approached very obliquely, might be a better way of putting it.

Yeah, Another Earth is pretty interesting in this regard. Until the very end, the sci-fi concept feels almost extraneous, you could imagine the same story being told more or less the same way without it... But the ending requires it, because it literalizes the central "where would I be now if things had gone differently in the past?" question. OTOH, I thought Another Earth was kinda weak in this regard, because the central incident that changes everything, the one the protagonists would want to change, is an accident and not something done by conscious choice, so the sort of ethical ponderings other movies mentioned above apply to these kind of situations don't really work in this movie.

The accident was quite definitely her fault though, and avoidable.

I dunno, it's been awhile since I saw the movie, but doesn't the accident happen because the other Earth suddenly appears in the sky, and she's surprised by it?

I guess she could've driven more carefully and avoided the accident... But in these other movies, the ethical dilemmas the characters face are very essential ones (do I sacrifice my personal happiness so that a loved one can be happy? or: do I sacrifice my life so that others may live?), and compared to that, "should I or should I not drive more carefully?" is pretty trivial, it's not like anyone would choose the latter option if they knew the consequences.

I really kind of hated Another Earth. Felt like it invented a whole other planet just for it to serve as a thin metaphor for the pathetic lead character's selfish behavior. The ending is kind of cool for a split-second until you start to think about it for even a minute, at which point that, too, becomes deeply annoying.

I kind of liked her ham-fisted attempt to deal with consequences of stupid and selfish mistake that ends up being just as stupid and selfish.

Will check out Happy Accidents and Stranger Than Fiction, hopefully will never have to sit through Knowing.

I kind of liked her ham-fisted attempt to deal with consequences of stupid and selfish mistake that ends up being just as stupid and selfish.

... it reminded me a little bit of Margaret in that regard.

why does this thread keep asking me to login to i@m✧✧✧@✧.u✧

pplains' image upthread, maybe get a mod to fix.

i figured the jake-moment kind of gooses the guy into acting and it's still really him afterwards -- was half expecting it would be his face you see in that chrome sculpture.

this would have single-handedly made the ending pretty great and changed the entire way i thought about the movie

It makes me wonder a little why other movies haven't done more with the Groundhog Day set-up. You can use it for anything: comedy, thriller, romance, probably musicals if you wanted.

Just watched this. The difference between this and Groundhog Day is that Source Code requires you to pretend the premise is serious, because if it is just utter nonsense then there's no way it can work as a thriller. Something must be at stake in a thriller. In a comedy utter nonsense is comfortably at home.

As I watched it, the primary suspense was in waiting to answer to the question: what batshit notion will they come up with next to keep this plot from falling over on its side twitching? I dutifully attempted to swallow as much as I could, but half my mind was always rejecting what the other half was trying to follow.

Also, as noted upthread, Vera Farmiga is strangely watchable in every film I've seen her in, regardless of how lame the script may be. I've yet to decipher how this happens. She's most of what kept me from giving up on it.

I think it's possible to use this concept in a sci-fi/thriller in a way that doesn't feel like nonsense, but the rules of the story have to be establishend in a more rigid manner than in a fantasy movie like Groundhog Day, because people expect thrillers and sci-fi to be more "realistic". So even if the time loop is based on a non-existent sci-fi concept, it at least has to make sense somehow. In a fantasy setting that's not necessary, because in those reality can simply bend according to the will of characters. In Groundhog Day Bill Murray escapes the loop because he's ready to become a better person, and no other explanation is needed.

The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Cause and Effect" is a good example of a time loop story that works, because the way they get out of the loop follows the rules established in the episode. It's not exactly realistic, but it makes good enough sense that in a sci-fi setting the rules of time could work like this, so the viewer is willing to accept the solution.

Source Code would've worked like this too if it had ended with the protagonist completing his mission and dying, because that would've gone according to the premise the movies established. But in the end, for whatever reason they decided he should still have a happy ending, and they couldn't have done it without breaking their own rules, so the solution makes no sense. They step out of the sci-fi setting (where the time loop rules can't be just broken like that) into a fantasy one (where the protagonist's desire to live and love is stronger than any laws of physics), and it doesn't work. So you can write this kind of a story either as sci-fi or fantasy, but you can't do both without the viewer feeling cheated.

the very fact they could decipher where the bomb was from the brain matter of dead people who didn't know where the bomb was might be the stupidest thing I've ever seen in a film, unless I'm missing something?

Jeffrey Wright should host a series of horror infomercials where he "sells" you ideas like
* Frankenstein's monster
* Nuclear weapons
* Eugenics
* Skynet
etc

Edge of Tomorrow was Groundhog Day as successful sic-fi/action-thriller.