We dive headfirst into Jake Gyllenhaal's trippy new sci-fi flick.
By Eric Ditzian
Michelle Monaghan and Jake Gyllenhaal in "Source Code"
Photo: Summit Entertainment
Duncan Jones pulled off a nifty feat for his first cinematic trick: He took the all-too-often-banal sci-fi genre and infused it with new life, at the same time paying homage to past classics. "Moon" was a revelation, one made all the more impressive because it was Jones' feature debut. Not only did he spin an inventive tale — about a solitary man, played by Sam Rockwell, working on a lunar base when very strange things start to happen — but he did so for just a couple million dollars. Oh, and he coaxed out perhaps the finest performance of Rockwell's career.
Where would Jones go from there? Straight back into sci-fi land, it turned out, this time with a bigger budget and one of the biggest Hollywood stars in Jake Gyllenhaal. "Source Code" arrived in theaters Friday (April 1), and it's a doozy, but we expected nothing less from Jones. In fact, we've been eagerly expecting the movie since word of the project first popped up in November 2009. Before hitting the theater, read on for everything you need to know about "Source Code."
Foundations
The movie's plotline was immediately intriguing. Gyllenhaal plays a helicopter pilot named Captain Colter Stevens, who inexplicably awakens in the body of a commuter on a train and has no idea how he got there. Eight minutes later, the train explodes. Gradually, Stevens learns he's part of a government program called Source Code that allows him to travel back into the past again and again — a past he can't change — to find out who blew up the train and hopefully prevent the next terrorist attack.
After Gyllenhaal signed on at the end of '09, he was followed the next year by Jeffrey Wright as the brains behind the program, Vera Farmiga as his fellow military employee and Michelle Monaghan as a woman Stevens meets on the train. Shooting began in March 2010, but when we caught up with Farmiga at the Oscars, she couldn't tell us much about the production.
"I'll tell you why," she explained. "Because I haven't wrapped my head around it myself and I'm going to sound like an utter idiot trying to explain it to you. It's a pretty complicated plot — with all due respect to Duncan Jones. I'm sure Duncan is not proud of me in this moment."
Introductions
We didn't hear much about "Source Code" until the end of the year, when the first trailer arrived. The footage delivered a vibe that mixed "Déjà Vu" and "12 Monkeys"-style sci-fi with a high concept reminiscent of "Groundhog Day." But there also seemed something unique in the works. Our only complaint was the trailer seemed to give too much away. To a lesser extent, that's how we felt about a second trailer too.
In a weird way, the movie's first five minutes, which were recently posted online, revealed far less than either of the trailers or the exclusive clips we ran earlier this month. But not much could diminish our enthusiasm for "Source Code"; there was a reason we named it one of our most anticipated films of 2011.
Revelations
We weren't the only ones immediately drawn into the film's central conceit. "I was just fascinated with the idea, the concept of what the Source Code was because it felt like the center of the movie is this computer program," Gyllenhaal told MTV News recently. "So I thought, 'Well, does this hold water?' And then I thought, 'It does because it's a computer program that allows somebody to go into the body of another person for the last eight minutes of their life.' Had it been a computer program that allows somebody to go into somebody else's body, just anybody's body, it wouldn't be interesting, but this plays on the usurping of the electromagnetic impulses in the brain right before somebody dies."
Fascinating stuff to be sure, but handled poorly, the idea could come off as some third-rate SyFy cheesefest. Instead, in the hands of Jones and writer Ben Ripley, it turned out to be a winner.
"There are some heady ideas here," Jones explained to us, "and I think [Ripley's] done a really good job of balancing what the audience needs to know and giving the audience enough rules that if you just invite them to take a leap of faith you'll go with it and you can enjoy the ride."
Check out everything we've got on "Source Code."
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