Source Code (Duncan Jones' new film)

[Old Nehamkin]

I thought it was very good as well. It wasn't quite as good as moon, but you've got to remember that this isn't a personal project of Jones' like that film was, it's based on an existing studio script which he was given to direct, and I think that his ability to elevate what could have been a more standard action film into something surprisingly moving and thought-provoking is testament to his skill as a director. It's definitely a more mainstream film, but I found it thematically similar to moon in some ways regarding self-identity and, like Inception, it required far more attention and thought from the audience. If this film does well it will be very good for Jones' career, and having seen that he is capable of working with a bigger budget and deliver results producers will be more likely to finance the films he really wants to make, like mute.
RE: The ending, Jones was asked on twitter whether the ending was the result of studio interfernece, and he answered:

no. Ending of film is as I wanted it. There was another more Hollywood romantic ending we were asked to try in edit.

He also stated:

trust me.. the more you think about the ending, the more twisted it really is.

so he clearly doesn't view it as a conventional happy ending, and I don't think it should be seen like that, it's clearly very morally ambiguous.
Oh yeah, there was one moment about the film I absolutely hated, and that was

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FUCKING BING

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[thugler]

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when in actual fact it was creating a new reality each time

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This is not how I saw it. I thought they were hinting at that earlier, but the ending shows that there is 1 reality and the machine actually enables him to travel back in time and change the future, thus being able to contact the military lady in the past. I didn't see anything that made it need to be an alternate universe.

The ending worked I suppose, but it mostly made me think of how many interesting things that could've been done with the premise. Perhaps in a sequel. For a start he's taken over another persons life. Is his mind now in two places at once? (in the injured body and in the man in the past he's taken over?

It's almost like the premise and a few plot elements are much more interesting than the film itself and are not allowed to be explored to their potential.

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Hopefully if this does fairly well Jones will be able to make a more personal and intellectual film next.

[Harpo Speaks]

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This is not how I saw it. I thought they were hinting at that earlier, but the ending shows that there is 1 reality and the machine actually enables him to travel back in time and change the future, thus being able to contact the military lady in the past. I didn't see anything that made it need to be an alternate universe.

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Interesting. I thought there were elements of the dialogue that

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suggested the AR theories, for example when he says something along the lines of 'it's the same train, but different', and when he asked Farmiga's character if she believes that there's a different Goodwin somewhere who made different choices etc. I can't remember what the message at the end exactly said, but didn't it mention something about 'you think source code does this, but you are creating whole worlds'?

At first I wondered how he could get a message across realities, but what I now think is that he doesn't - the Goodwin he sends the message to exists in the same universe and at the same time - we also see Rutledge mention that they've just heard a terrorist attack has been foiled.

Of course if he is simply travelling back in time, within one universe, then doesn't him stopping the bombing create a paradox? Without the bomb going off he is never sent back to investigate the cause of the bomb in the first place, and therefore wouldn't be there to stop it. And so on.

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I'm going to go hunting for Duncan Jones' comments on the film I think.

[Lt Plonker]

Indeed, I've seen it getting praise elsewhere as being Hermannesque, but I found it quite intrusive at times. Shame, as the use of music in Moon just added to the beautiful atmosphere of it.

Thirded. In fact, I've just checked, and the composer's name is Chris P. Bacon.

Someone, somewhere is having a laugh.

[Boycey]

Regarding the Quantum Leap stuff - it turns out that the voice of Stevens dad in the film is done by ... Scott Bakula. Methinks Duncan Jones knew exactly where some of the inspirations came from or it is a WHACKING great coincidence.

And - as far as I can tell after some research - Chris P Bacon is a genuine composer and that is his genuine name. Genuinely.

[weekender]

Oh yeah, there was one moment about the film I absolutely hated, and that was

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FUCKING BING

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When I was leaving the cinema I said "Well, it was a bit unrealistic, wasn't it?  I mean, using Bing instead of Google, come on!". 

Not one fucker near me laughed, the fucking cunts.

[Custard]

I really enjoyed it, but it could have done without the last 15 minutes or so. It's certainly no Moon, but very enjoyable none-the-less.

I also think this, pretty much.

As a previous poster said,

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I think it should've ended on the kiss and the frozen people smiling and laughing. Would've been quite the thought-provoking, (dare i say it) beautiful ending.

After that point, it kinda dragged on, for no real reason. Wasn't 15 minutes mind, more like 5! Still

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I also found the soundtrack a little OTT, but not to the point of real distraction. Could've been pared down a bit, mind.

All in all, i really enjoyed it, and Duncan Jones is now creeping into my favourite directors list. I'll be hugely interested in anything he does now, after Moon and now this 'un. Both fine films, that I feel i could watch over n over and still get something from each time. Looking forward to a second watch

Lovely stuff.

[phes]

Both fine films...

Moon was a fine film. Source code was fine. World of difference between though. I hadn't realised until now that Jones wasn't involved in the script for SC and this is something to be grateful for, because the script was fairly bollocks. Moon was spot on; the soundtrack, direction, script and performance were all outstanding. This isn't the case here with SC. Waht the heck was going on with the Jeffrey Wright character because I almost shat myself sniggering in the cinema (testament to the alright quality of the film that I hung in there while needing a poo). Film was as good as it could've been I suppose and that's probably credit Jone's directing. A good shit film, but not a great shit film.

[Custard]

Duncan Jones didn't write the screenplay, no. I don't remember the script being that bad, though. Any examples of shitness? Or did it all rankle?

The only thing i remember getting on my nerves a bit was the soundtrack towards the end. Went a bit too sappy and "big"

It's no Moon, but its still a very enjoyable, fast-paced, exciting, interesting film by my book. And its a real book, with pages, you know.

[Vitalstatistix]

The script was written by the mastermind behind both Species III and Species: The Awakening, fact fans.

I think it's a competent, snappy thriller let down by a terrible final act and some bland characterisation. There's some good ideas which never go anywhere, and some engaging sequences. Compared to Moon, it's a piece of shit, but I certainly won't be writing Jones off just yet.

[phes]

incidentally...



concept art from 'mute', the second in the moon trio.

[Custard]

Yeah, Jones said he wanted to make Mute as his second film, but did Source Code instead for some reason he didn't really go into (studio pressure, maybe?). Anyone know any more about that?

[phes]

guess he's having trouble getting it taken on.

think the writer (Source code) has pretty much got a bye here on the back of good direction and a lot of goodwill following Jones's debut. The reviews the film is getting and scores on the tomato meters and blah blah o meters etc are very high for a film that's just fine. It's getting 8/10 and 90% and the like, and although all that's pretty much a crock of poop, I reckon it tells you how much people want to enjoy his new work and how promising a director he is. Becuase there's certainly been leftfield sci-fi/horror/fantasy films in the last few years with  lower budgets that have been better, but have been received worse.

There's certainly some post Inception thing going on here.

 

[Custard]

Or, you know, maybe those people just really enjoyed it?

Always hate it when people present their own opinion as fact. Its not, its just your opinion innit!

Erm... in my opinion ;-D

[phes]

it was a reckoning A RECKONING I TELL YOU.

[Harpo Speaks]

Waht the heck was going on with the Jeffrey Wright character because I almost shat myself sniggering in the cinema (testament to the alright quality of the film that I hung in there while needing a poo).

You ain't wrong there, he might as well have been twiddling his moustache and laughing maniacally for the entire running time, it was like he was from a completely different film.

[Benevolent Despot]

I thought it was ok. That's it. It was fairly uncomplicated and bland (both in acting and script) until the last few minutes, when some new ideas are thrown at you -

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essentially the crossover of realities - communication from one to the next about the future, or aversion of potential futures.

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I guess when you are dealing with ideas and scripts of this nature you are going to draw comparisons to stuff like Groundhog Day and 12 Monkeys - which is what I thought of watching it. In fact the line "It's the same dream, but it's different!" or something similar, reminded me of "The movie never changes. It can't change. but every time you see it, it seems different because you're different" from 12 Monkeys. Maybe it was intentional, maybe not.

I think movies which are similar in plot should at least excel in some different direction, whether it be new ideas or twists, different acting or wildly different circumstance. This was just bland, it added nothing. Dialogue was a bit naff too. Jake Gylenhall was a bit too "Woah man I don't understand this" for a bit too long. He also seemed unnatural in his reaction to his circumstances (at least in the "real world").

To continue the negativity, I never understood the love for Moon either, sure it was stylistically sure of itself and created a believable world (although it still (knowingly) aped a kind of 60s Sci-fi moonbase Gerry Anderson / Space 2001 feel), I thought the whole premise was just so simple and drawn out.

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"A man is one a series of clones that comes to discover this. Cue existential pondering and anger at circumstance"

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. I just thought the story was a big "so what?".

[Onionlimit]

I only now found out he's David Bowie's son. 

When I saw Moon, I never really read any reviews for it or knew anything about it going in, but I'm still surprised I never came across that.

Anyway, Fox are trying to get him to do The Wolverine since Aronofsky dropped out.  He doesn't seem to be considering it, but has went to meetings 'to be polite'.  It'd be interesting to see his take on a superhero, but studio pressure/ lack of control would probably come into play.  I really hope Source Code's success has meant that Mute will definitely happen now.  He seemed to be really excited about the idea in the interviews with him I've seen.

[Aploplectic]

With regards to the music - I didn't find it too intrusive, except perhaps right towards the end.  At the very beginning of the film I thought that the music over the titles (along with the shots of the train and Chicago) was very good.  It was powerful, exciting, and it created an atmosphere.  It is a stretch to call it Hermannesque, but I have no doubt that that is exactly what Crispy was aiming for.

The film itself was pretty good, but I agree that the ending let it down. 

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Funny that people have said the idea of pausing on the kiss/laughing would have been better, because that is exactly what I thought.  I can just about get onboard with the alternate reality stuff, but the idea that at the end he is conscious both in the host's body and in the machine lost me a bit.

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That said, I thought there were a number of good things about the film.  For example,

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the reveal of the pod he was in simply being his imagination was well handled, and I liked that we kept returning to him just sitting on the floor among the computer innards.  Similarly, perhaps it shouldn't have come as a surprise, but the point when everything he was saying was shown to be just text on the screen was something I found a bit shocking.

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[phes]

They should have at least

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properly sown up his body though. It's asking you to take a bit of a leap to believe they're keeping his brain alive, despite fifty percent of his body being absent and the fifty percent that remains has been left to just slide out of his arse end. Maybe he's in some incredible chamber that miraculously does the job of blood, without blood. I struggled to accept that much more than than the brain-swapping bit

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the reveal made me burst out laughing. maybe I need to watch it again for detail, but it struck me as very very sloppy.

[Old Nehamkin]

Here's a recent interview with Jones: http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/849690/duncan_jones_interview_source_code_science_fiction_superman_wolverine_and_more.html

I found this part particularly interesting:

I was intrigued by the ending of Source Code, which I thought could be perceived as a bleak ending, as well as a happy one. Was that something you had to encourage the producers to let you include?

I totally agree with you, and thank you, because you're one of the few people who realises that it's not necessarily a happy ending.

I really pushed for the ending that we've got right now. In fact, I felt that there was a payoff to the science fiction set-up, a paradox that wasn't in the script. And it really should be there, because if you're going to do all this work, coming up with a science fiction conceit, make sure you've got the payoff at the end of it.

The idea is, Colter Stevens is sent from one reality into a parallel reality, and because he stops the train blowing up in that parallel reality, he's never sent on the mission in the first place, which means, in this new reality, there's the Colter Stephens at the place where Goodman works, who is basically a prisoner, because he's never been sent on a mission yet.

And he sends that Goodman an email saying, "Please, help him." And obviously, Sean Fentress is dead, because Colter took his place.

So, you're right. There's a bleakness to that, that some people have completely missed, and they say it's a cop-out and a happy ending. I don't think it is.

The happy ending the producers were originally talking about, where Colter and Christina are at the reflective statue, and they live happily ever after, that would have been a cop-out for me, having set up that science fiction conceit.

[Vitalstatistix]

Ehh

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if it looks and feels so much like a lame, tacked-on happy ending, then I'm afraid the director is to blame for not making his 'bleak' vision clear enough to the audience

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It's good at least that he's engaging with criticism, and that he really thinks about his films and wants that complexity.

So there's going to be a Moon trilogy? I didn't realise. I hope Rockwell's in it, I have a man crush on that dude.

[Johnny Townmouse]

Count me in as underwhelmed. The photography was great, and some of the aerial shots of the city were really impressive. But I felt like it never mined the material - it was 20mins too short from my point of view.

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It was about him apprehending the bomber. That bomber was revealed very early on and I assumed that there was something else going on. In fact, I completely assumed that the teacher guy was involved in some way, or indeed the Baddie Scientist was involved. Indeed, the last time that Gylenhaal's character goes back into the Matrix, I thought he would find out that Baddie Scientist had trained the very well armed bomber terrorist of non-Muslim origin, in order to create the whole scenario and get the nobel peace prize after the bomber is thwarted. Then Gylenhaal would somehow have to tell the woman. When that didn't happen, and it was literally him just trying to save the people after essentially taking over the life of some poor teacher guy, I was left feeling disappointed. I'm not saying my hypothesised ending is better - in fact I was dreading that ending whilst watching it, but I wanted something more. I wanted to know WHY the teacher was chosen, and why they didn't just try and stick him in earlier, to catch the bomber putting the bomb on the train. So many questions were left hanging, that I assumed were integral to how the third act would unfold. The music was fucking appalling.

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I think that Jones has built up a lot of good-will because of Moon, and I feel that critics just don't want to savage him. Kermode was very reservedly positive about this film, and I don't think he genuinely likes it. In fact, if it had been a different director I think he would have savaged it.

[Aploplectic]

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I wanted to know WHY the teacher was chosen, and why they didn't just try and stick him in earlier, to catch the bomber putting the bomb on the train. spoiler]

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I don't want to defend the film too much but I'm pretty sure they said that

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the teacher was chosen because he was some kind of match for Stevens (presumably genetically/ the way their brains were structured) and eight minutes was something to do with how long the part of short term memory that they were tapping in to lasts.

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[Johnny Townmouse]

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Yeah, there were a few things that were just tossed out like that, but I always assumed that there was a reason for so many of the things that were seeded at the start of the film. People have been talking about this film being Hitchcockian, but for me the reason it fails is because it just isn't Hitchcockian enough. I always assumed that there was another layer to this film, but it really didn't have that final push. In fact, it terms of narrative scope, it felt quite SF TV to me. Other than the rather cheesy denoument, it felt like it only had two acts.

There was quite a bit of laughter in the cinema I saw it at in Leicester Square. The bit when Gylenhaal's oozing semi-body is revealed provoked proper laughter from half of the audience. I'm not sure that humour was what Jones was aiming for.

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[Maybe Im Doing It Wrong]

Yeah, it was too short, wasn't it? (Which is the opposite of what I think of most films these days.) It could have done with another half an hour of him repeating his eight minutes and figuring out who the baddie was.

Ultimately it came across as less serious a film than Groundhog Day.

[Johnny Townmouse]

Agreed, it really did feel quite flimsy.

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Also, I think they bottled it with the repetitions. Seeing him go back into the same scenario is really the hook for the film, and I could have quite happily watched it many, many times without growing bored. I wanted him to get a new piece of info each time, and also be confoundedm and contradicted, but slowly build up a pattern. It was so fucking quick. He just called the number and bang he had the guy.

The more I think about it, the more I grow irritated at how much they didn't get into the meat of the entire concept. As a genre piece it is very unsatisfying. I don't need twists, but I do need to be confounded and confused. I came away being surprised merely by the idea that they thought this was narratively enough.

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[phantom_power]

for me the film wasn't about him finding the bomber but about him finding out about his situation and some way to resolve it. finding the bomber was just the macguffin, to misuse a term slightly, to tell the story of gyllenhall's character. in terms of the science pretty much everything is explained in the film

[Famous Mortimer]

I didn't dislike it, but I thought it wasn't as brilliant or clever as it thought it was. Johnny Townmouse has summed up what I thought about it, but I wanted to restate about it having one layer too few, in a way. The idea of there being alternate universes that get created every time you make another decision is a nice idea, but there's no need for it to exist for the film's conclusion to make sense – like something which was going to form a larger part of an earlier draft of the script but then got mostly deleted.

Also, the source code itself might as well be magic.

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I'm not one of those sci-fi fans who insists on every bit of tech having tons of explanation, but unless I was reaching for my M&Ms and missed a bit, the way they transport an entire person's consciousness an unspecified distance, in a matter of minutes, into someone else's 8 minutes of death-memory is never explained, at all – and it's kind of important. They could have stretched that running time a minute or two more and popped something in there. Thinking about it, if all he's doing is existing inside the brain chemistry of another dead person then how he can move outside that dead person's field of perspective and do things like get off the train and successfully stop a bomb being sent to blow up Chicago? I'm trying to remember back to that bit, but it's not time travel, is it? The 8 minutes is described like it's a tape, or something.

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Actually, scratch that last bit; I'm not sure and I'm probably going to be proved wrong.

The last two films of this sort I remember watching were "12 Monkeys" and "Primer". They both inspired hours-long debates afterwards with the groups of people I watched them with. This inspired a series of shrugs with "it was...good" and then moving on to talk about a party this weekend. Kermode's very guarded positivity towards it sounds about right. I'm glad films like this are getting made, I just wish they'd done a little more with it.

Re: the ending.

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I spotted straight away that it wasn't a happy ending – he's either a dream in a dead person's subconscious or he's completely killed another person and taken their body. I mean, how weird is it going to be to see someone else's reflection in the mirror every day for the rest of your life? And how's he going to adapt to being a teacher? And what happens when he runs into someone he used to know in his old body? In fact, it's not so much a dark ending as too many loose ends.

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[phantom_power]

the darkness of the ending is that

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every time he goes into the source code he creates a new universe in which he fails and a large percentage of the population of chicago are killed in a dirty bomb. effectively, even though they saved thousands of lives in the original reality, they probably killed millions in all the others

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