The number 2 male-fantasy, just after beating-up a rapist, is time-travel in all its permutations. Some people go out and protect JFK, like in that Quantum Leap finale and the upcoming Stephen King novel. Some go back and shoot slave-owners in the chest. Others go back and meet their moms while she's in her juicy prime. That time-travel movie Source Code came out around the same time as Inception so there’s similarities. Source Code has a similar nested plotline like Nolan’s dream within a dream and they both play with temporality. Source Code is the much smaller movie as the action almost entirely takes place in a single train-cabin. But it's also the more elegant movie and, in some ways, the more satisfying one. While Leo Dicaprio scowled through his 40-minute tutorial on his universe's internal logic, Source Code has us believing effortlessly and almost immediately.
Captain Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) believes easy, too, because he's a good soldier and follows orders. Source code is, we learn, to a dead mind as that afterglow is to an extinguished lightbulb. There's an aura of still existing memory after a person dies. And it lasts 8 minutes. Stevens is a pilot who's just finished a tour in Afghanistan and who now finds himself in a different kind of cockpit. There's that familiar seatbelt that straps across his chest in an 'x' and that unfamiliar video-monitor that displays his military liaison Captain Goodwin (Vera Fermigia) back at mission control. The walls are dark and slanted like the inside of a cavern. His mission: connect to the source code of a Chicago-area high school teacher, one of hundreds that die on a train explosion, and assume his identity to find the bomber. Once he gets the terrorist’s info, Stevens can pass that on to his real-world superiors and prevent more deaths. A single bomber among hundreds. And each time Stevens fails to find the bomber, he wakes up in the cockpit before going back in to those 8-minutes, each time different, but the same, to fail and die again.
Of course, there's a pretty girl involved which is what time-travel movies almost always come down to. Marker's La Jetee, and Gilliam's La Jetee remake 12 Monkeys, are both about nostalgia and have that wistful feel of lost love and regret. That aura of an extinguished lightbulb is a good metaphor for that, too. Even though 12 Monkeys didn't age perfectly (it's been about 15 years since it came out) that image of a long-wigged Bruce Willis getting got in slo-mo, a prime-Madeline Stowe watching from a distance sticks out. Each time Stevens connects to the high-school teacher, the first person he sees is his fellow teacher Christina, played by Michelle Monaghan. Almost a dead-ringer for Stowe, she's an easy-go to fall-in-love-with 8-minutes at a time. Cutesy and brunette, with a nose that’s not as sharp as Rachel Mcadams’s and a quieter and smaller mouth than Anne Hathaway's. With her plan to quit her job and travel to India, she stanks of pixie dreamgirl. In one of the 8-minutes, she bends to wipe coffee off Stevens's shoe and, in another, defends him from Amtrak security after he's caught with a gun. "You're very decent and kind," Stevens tells her. And after every 8-minutes, Stevens has to watch her fold-up and die. One time, the flames shreds her face in slow-motion. Another time she lies, 3 bullets in her chest, motionless in a parking lot except for a frightened tear that runs down her face. Over and again Stevens fails to save her and, of course, that becomes his real mission. The terrorist and his motives are so bare and cliche that it’s almost just decoration.
Note that Russell Peters plays himself, for all intents and purposes, as one of the passengers. "He came in third on America's Got Talent," Christina says. I thought it so odd when I'd heard about his casting. But, there's something apt about his comedy being a part of the movie. He's about comfortable laughs, jokes about race that are accurate yet never offensive. At one point, Stevens makes a bet with him that he (Peters) can't make the passengers all laugh. There's a shot where the passengers are all frozen in laughter, except for Monaghan and Gylenhal who are frozen in mid-kiss. The camera pans backwards and we're almost directly facing Peters's grinning, frozen audience. Time-travel stories are most often warm and cozy, too. Stevens eventually asks Christina out for coffee. Other than Peters’s comedy, what’s more comforting than the idea of fixing past girl-mistakes?
