Source Code
starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga, Russell Peters and Jeffrey Wright
written by Ben Ripley
directed by Duncan Jones
Rating: ♦◊◊◊◊
This is a dumb movie about a dead U.S.military helicopter pilot, a veteran of the Afghanistan war, whose brain is still functioning. His body, sustained by life support systems, is being used for some devilish mad-scientist scheme to thwart terrorist attacks by some kind of transmigration of his conscious mind into the minds of deceased victims of a domestic terrorist attack in order to identify the terrorists before the attack occurs. It’s not a time travel story so much as a consciousness travel story. I thought it was going to be different from what it was, and I was disappointed.
The interesting thing about the plot is that it takes place in repeating 8-minute segments - the limit of the lingering, postmortem consciousness of the brains of the attack victims. I thought it might be comparable to some kind of insane Groundhog Day. Each 8-minute segment is different as the protagonist learns to alter reality in the real world from his nether world of the undead.
It’s almost a piece of crap film.