A truncated look at Source Code

For what it's worth, I'm glad it'll be another four years before we have to do another election. The constant attack ads are seriously annoying.

And with a majority government there are no more excuses. Get things done! Someone!

And if you're anti-conservatives, this is the necessary rope to hang themselves with. As I alluded to when I said "there are no more excuses".

Before I actually went to see Source Code I invited someone along who I thought would really like it. Turns out she thought it looked absolutely terrible.

It's like buying a present for someone, so sure they'd love it, and then finding out how off base I am.

I was excited about the film because of all the interviews Jake Gyllenhaal had done- I saw him on Conan and... either Stewart or Colbert- and it turns out the man was funny. Hilarious even! It was a whole new side of the guy. For the most part he was just intense staring man.

So two weeks ago now I saw the movie with a couple of buds. The movie goes like this. Uh, huge spoilers, so if you haven't seen it yet, and I really do recommend it, then stop reading. So I recommend you stop reading my writing here... in that case I should just blather on, maybe control-copy off a wikipedia page or something. Anywa, the movie goes like this.

A commuter train to Chicago is blown up in a messy explosion. That sounds redundant, but the idea is it wasn't JUST blown up, but it blew up next to a fuel train for the purposes of spectacle.

This was a warning shot. There will be a bigger attack via a dirty bomb in the centre of Chicago soon after, so the question is who blew up that train, and where is the Chicago target going to be.

Enter the Source Code project. They take a subject (in this case Gyllenhaal's character) and implant him in a digital recreation of the world 8 minutes before the train exploded. Gyllenhaal has to search the train, over and over, getting blown up each time, to find out all he can, to figure out how to stop the imminent large scale attack on Chicago.

How exactly this works is the source of most (if not all) debate my little study group had after the movie was over.

When Gyllenhaal, who was suffering from some memory loss due to the circumstances of the procedure, asked about what this Source Code stuff was all about, he's told in perfect Hollywood science-y vague terms that it's all parabolic quantum calculus, that he wouldn't understand.

Or was it quantum parabolic calculus?

It doesn't matter- but regardless the best Hollywood science technobabble is the kind that strikes a genuine chord with the viewer, that uses a word that you recognize that totally works in the context of the story.

Gyllenhaal (I don't remember his characters name, and I've already control copied "Gyllenhaal" so it's easier to just paste that everywhere. GyllenhaalGyllenhaalGyllenhaal. See? Easy!) keeps confusing the process with straight time travel, trying to contact his father while in the simulation, and just generally effect the outside world. But he's always told: it's just a simulation

***

I've taken an hour an a half off to browse tv tropes pages- it's rough right this second to have the focus to express what was awesome about this movie, because I feel like I have to set it up so much.

The big thing, just to skip to it, is at the end when Gyllenhaal is convinced that this is the last run through on the train, his real body is dead, the program is about to run its course, and even though that's all she wrote- in this run through he stopped the explosion. In those last seconds, he made his time count, and you can sit back and say "that's a good life, all in that moment." It was beautiful.

And then, to Gyllenhaal's surprise more than anybody else's, it kept going. Things didn't just "end" when the program was over. For whatever reason, figuring that out was why I had to set up everything, to get across my reasoning for why this could happen, but for whatever reason- it kept going. He got to have his happy ending, maybe in a world that could end at any time, but definitely in a world where he learned to make every single second count.

It was a gorgeous ending, completely uplifting.

And other than that, I don't feel like getting into the theory on how this was possible in story right this second.

Maybe I didn't spoil so much after all.

Er, except the ending, that was spoiled.