BEFORE: I'm putting the Denzel Washington chain on hold for the night, because I can't resist putting two very similar-looking films back-to-back. Just like I did for "The Road" and "The Book of Eli", and many other pairings in the past. In both films, it looks like people are trying to avoid train disasters, but this one adds the element of time-travel, and I just LOVE time travel films. Will this one measure up?
Linking from "Unstoppable", Ethan Suplee was in a film called "Brothers" with Jake Gyllenhaal (last seen in "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time"). Other links are possible, but I don't want to repeat myself later this week.
THE PLOT: A soldier wakes up in the body of an unknown man and discovers he's part of a mission to find the bomber of a Chicago commuter train.
AFTER: So yeah, this was like "Unstoppable" meets "12 Monkeys", or perhaps "Groundhog Day", which seems promising since I like those films. (Heck, throw in "Donnie Darko" too, since that film gets evoked just by Gyllenhaal's presence.) When Bruce Willis was sent back in time in "12 Monkeys" to prevent a disaster, that was done really well (see below for notes on time travel scenarios). He wasn't trying to prevent the disaster, but merely gain information about it. And like "Groundhog Day", the main character here is allowed to repeat the same 8 minutes again and again, until he can gain some control over the situation.
There's also a dose of "The Matrix" - the whole "brain in a jar" theory of cosmology. What if our whole reality was some kind of computer simulation, and we were just some brain being kept entertained by a large variety of false stimuli? If everything we saw, felt, and tasted was an illusion created by electrical impulses? And what if we knew that simulation was going to end soon, how would that affect our decisions? And if you could return to a critical 8-minute period in your past, what would you do differently? And if that were possible, would a different choice change the future, or just create a divergent reality?
Lots of questions tonight, and I'm not sure I agree with the "answers" that the film provides. But then again, we're not really dealing with true time travel here (or are we?). And the main character can't really change the past (or can he?). That doesn't mean that this isn't an entertaining sort of thrill ride, because it is, but it's not really what they sold me. It's like a waitress brought me the wrong entree - if I'm in a good restaurant I still expect the food to be delicious, but it's just not what I ordered.
NITPICK POINT: IF the Source Code is just a computer simulation (and I'm not saying it is, because apparently reality itself is subjective...) and it's based on the last 8 minutes of a man's memory, then the simulation would be limited to just what that man saw, touched or sensed. If he didn't look inside a woman's purse, for example, then the simulation wouldn't know what to put in there. There would be gaps, like when you try to read a book in your dreams. It might try to fill those gaps, but that information would be speculative.
NITPICK POINT 2: Negated by further plot developments. No, wait, you know what? I retract my retraction. Because I thought for a while that the filmmakers understood how time travel and quantum thingies "work", and then they proved to me that they didn't. There are clearly stated limitations regarding what Source Code can do, and then they get ignored. The result is an ending similar to the re-worked version of "Brazil" - the BAD one, not the director's cut. I would have been fine with a more downbeat ending, and I won't say any more about it.
So, here's the time-travel paradox. If you can travel back in time to prevent an event, let's say the assassination of Lincoln, which you know about from history books, you can't succeed. Because if you did, then there wouldn't be mention of the tragedy in the history books, and you wouldn't have learned about it, so you wouldn't know that it needed to be prevented, and you wouldn't go do so.
From this we can deduce that either: 1) controlled time travel is impossible, and will never be invented OR 2) changing the past is impossible, or if possible, creates a divergent reality instead of changing the future OR 3) time travel is possible, but changing an event in the past creates an even worse future, so whoever did so was forced to change history back. Possibility #1 is most likely, but all of them tend to take the fun out of things. Time travel: great for movies, bad for reality.
Also starring Vera Farmiga (last seen in "Autumn in New York"), Michelle Monaghan (last seen in "Mr. & Mrs. Smith"), Jeffrey Wright (last seen in "W."), and a cameo from Scott Bakula (Mr. Quantum Leap, nice...)
RATING: 7 out of 10 cell phones
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