There’s really a lot going on in Source Code, no small curiousity in light of Jones’ previous feature, the introspective, nearly impressionist one-man-show sci-fi of Moon, which was about as slow and delightfully spare a film as you could imagine in the modern era. While Moon was wonderfully confident, Source Code gives off the appearance of something struggling to overwhelm with pummeling breadth and complication at the expense of depth. Without spoiling much, we have a military man (Jake Gyllenhaal) waking up a different person on a train traveling from the suburbs of Chicago into the city. Caught in the grip of coming to terms with his new identity, the train blows up. He wakes up again, now his old self, albeit strapped in to some variant of military device, and he is told by a pair of high-ranking officials that he will have to repeat the exercise, given eight minutes a time, until he finds the location of the bomb and identity of the bomber. The bomb having actually gone off that morning, our hero’s mind had been transplanted into the brainwaves of a teacher that was on the train to solve the mystery and prevent the bomber from deploying any further weapons. How’s that for a high enough concept for you?
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