Broken premise

Rating: 3/10 (15 February 2016)

This movie is by itself not so bad, it's just based on a broken premise. That's the reason why you can't get into it: the story doesn't allow you to "think along" as it develops, because you don't understand the rules that the whole sci-fi situation is based on. At the end, you realize that they're just making up new rules as they go along, until it makes no sense anymore.
At first, very little is explained: Jake Gyllenhaal is a soldier who keeps getting zapped onto a train, 8 minutes before it blows up. The commander in charge pushes off any of his questions with "there's no time for this", which gets annoying very quickly.
Then some scientist guy explains the premise, and I have to say that at first it sounded really cool to me: turns out he's not being sent back in time, but rather being uploaded into a computer program, based on the last 8 minutes of memory of one guy who died on that train. At this point I'm thinking: "whoa this is an original idea!"
But then ... the soldier starts making all kinds of moves far outside the confines of what the dead guy could have experienced: he finds the bomb, gets off the train, shoots a guy, and so on. At this point, I started to question my own intelligence first. How is he doing these things? This was also the time my girlfriend gave up on the movie. Me, I was still hoping that it would end up making sense.
Then at the end, though his job of finding the criminal is done, the soldier starts pleading about how he wants to go back one more time to save the train. The scientist explains to him for the third of fourth time that it wouldn't change anything, because it's not a time machine. But he keeps going on and on about how he wants to save everyone and he just wants one shot to try and save the train.
At this point, I'm literally yelling at my TV screen: "IT'S A COMPUTER PROGRAM DUMBASS!!" Yet sure enough, they send him back one more time, he manages to saves the train and ... WAIT, WHAT? ... He actually changes the present!? Yup, suddenly the train blowup never even happened, because Gyllenhaal changed the past and stopped it from inside a magical computer program! Why? Because ... reasons!!
And that's when I realized that it wasn't me, this movie just bases itself on trying to be "Groundhog Day meets Quantum Leap", but it doesn't care at all about making a clear premise and sticking to it. It just makes it up as it goes along, and for a sci-fi movie, that's a pretty unsatisfying thing to watch.