Source Code

Reviews of Source Code have been exceptionally good. Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian - who usually serves as a definition of the artsy mainstream-hating reviewer - gives it 5 stars and glowing praise. Mark Kermode on Radio 5 was similarly positive on last week's podcast - likening it to Inception and comparing it favourably with director Duncan Jones' first film Moon. High praise indeed.

After trying to suppress expectations of a masterpiece of modern science fiction, I paid my £8 on Monday and hoped for the best. The film sets itself up as follows - Jake Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens, a US army pilot who wakes up in another man's body riding a train in suburban Chicago. After 8 minutes of confusion he is killed in an explosion on the train, then transported back to his own body inside a pod from which he can communicate with mysterious army scientists. These scientists explain to him that he is part of an experimental program named 'Source Code' - which is capable of putting him inside the mind of another person minutes before their death. The explosion he has just experienced happened earlier in the day, Stevens is expected to return to the train and re-experience events in order to work out who the bomber is and prevent a similar attack. The more times Stevens does this, the more times he becomes attached to events on the train and suspect that his minders in the real world aren't telling him everything they should.

The film is part action thriller and part romantic drama, but mostly a rehash of science fiction ideas from all over the genre. Most obviously the film owes a debt to Quantum Leap, but from a style point of view it feels like a very good episode of The Outer Limits - with its hard science fiction plots and traditional 'hmmm' moments at the end. 'Source Code' ends with what is trying to be one of those 'hmmm' moments, but in trying to appeal to the mainstream with a happy ending it gets derailed slightly. Where 'Inception' left the audience with a number of unanswered questions about its ending, 'Source Code' is very much straightforward by comparison. Although some people would probably consider a discussion of it to be a spoiler - so I wont go into it here. Seriously though, there's not much of a mystery to it.

What we have is nothing more than a pretty decent science fiction action thriller, I can't work out where all of the love in the press has come from for it. Perhaps merely bringing science fiction like this to a mass audience is worthy of heaped praise? The big difference between this and 'Moon' is that there's a lack of atmosphere in 'Source Code'. Where 'Moon' had claustrophobia and a sense of impending, inevitable and unspecified doom - 'Source Code' has explosions, a love story and a way for its main protagonist to avoid the doom. To call 'Source Code' a Holywood cop out would be too strong criticism - it's not that bad. I just feel like I've seen it before - although not necessarily done any better - and that 'Source Code' is hardly the revelation in the genre that some reviewers have suggested.