Not the best of the year...so far...

Rating: 8/10 (6 April 2011)

As my first film of 2011, Source Code ended up being as good as expected. It is not supposed to be a time-travel film. But, it plays like it at first. However, the difference between this movie and Back to the Future is that this movie has rules to explain whereas Back to the Future doesn't really.
It opens already into the story which seems placed in present time, where Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) is on a train to Chicago as passenger Sean Fentress. He soon after dies after a bomb on the train kills everyone on board, and wakes up in a capsule looking at a screen of Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga). She tells him what is supposed to do during his time using the program Source Code which is to find the bomber before the next destructive plan goes through.
I liked the film's somewhat repetitive style that reminds me of Vantage Point, and although I've never seen Quantum Leap, I have a feeling this film was using a similar storyline from another film. It's a fresh thriller and I liked the way the story gradually plays out. It's not very hard to guess the predictable culprit in the small cast.
My one problem with the film is how they establish rules and tell the audience (and Colter Stevens) that it's a program that uses memory and doesn't have the ability to alter reality nor time-travel, but then Colter Stevens figures out how to do exactly that in the end. It annoys me to know end if you establish rules for your movie, and then break them. It doesn't necessarily ruin the movie, but it makes it lose credibility.
It won't be the best film of the year, but it might be one of the top ten for me when the year is over.