Source Code

Poster.

The 40-year-old Duncan Zowie Jones certainly could have a successful career in TV with a revamped series of Tales of the Unexpected! His first feature film the 2009 science fiction thriller Moon told the story of a solitary Lunar Industries employee who experiences a personal crisis at the end of his three year stint overseeing the extraction of Helium 3, a source of clean energy for earth, as I have said previously it would have made a good first episode and his latest motion picture Source Code (2011) would make an even better second episode. Again it has a suitably outrageous story line with a twist at the end.

Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a helicopter pilot flying missions in Afghanistan who becomes part of a top-secret experimental government programme investigating a terrorist attack. He finds himself in the body of a Sean Fentress a teacher and regular commuter on a train that a terrorist plans to blow up. Stevens/Fentress have to constantly relive the harrowing train bombing until the person can be found who is responsible for the attack. It’s on these train journeys that he meets Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan) with whom he falls in love.  Vera Farmiga, who you will probable recognise from Up In The Air (2009), plays the part of Stevens indifferent controller who develops a computerised relationship with the pilot.  Jeffrey Wright plays Dr Rutledge the cold obsessive inventor of the Source Code.

 This techno-thriller could have been so much better if it had not been overly sentimental, dissolving a decent story in to some kind of techno romantic drama, cut down to fast paced 60 minutes it would have been terrific.  I would like to see Mr Jones try his hand at something with more backbone next time, A Matter of Life and Death its not.

Part Two!