Source Code (2011)

The poster and trailer for director Duncan Jones’ follow-up to the excellent Moon (2009) suggest a familiar development: a young filmmaker makes a splash with an intelligent, inexpensive and unusual independent/foreign feature and is immediately offered a bigger budget to turn a dumb script into a profitable movie.

Source Code‘s protagonist (ably if unremarkably played by Jake Gyllenhaal) is Colter Stevens, a soldier taking part in a secret, experimental programme: Stevens’ consciousness is transported into the body of a passenger on a train that exploded earlier that day, with eight minutes to find out who planted the bomb so the government can find the perpetrator and prevent him from detonating a second, bigger device. The premise isn’t exactly revolutionary, reminiscent as it is of TV’s Quantum Leap (the lead actor of which has a cameo in the film) and Tony Scott’s Deja Vu (2006), as well as, to a lesser degree, Groundhog Day (1993) and Paycheck (2003).

Both the trailer and the tagline on the poster (“Change the past. Save the future.”) imply that, contrary to what Stevens is told, the Source Code technology can alter time, if the plucky hero only shows enough rebelliousness to force a Hollywood happy ending into existence through sheer determination. So, Source Code exhibits all the signs of a competent, but rote and stereotypical sci-fi action thriller with nothing else to recommend it for.