Thank you Duncan Jones, for re-establishing my faith in the new breed of film directors. Not all's lost!!

Rating: 8/10 (18 May 2011)

Cinema is an art, beautiful, complex and surreal . To make a good film requires more than just money and a fancy equipment. The problem nowadays is that it has become more and more difficult to actually find the art in cinema . We have movies coming out, it seems in factory lines, with a particular format of budget and emotions. And all this while we forget to add the soul in films.... the soul which makes it what it is, but then again every once in a while we come across something which surprises us but at the same time we find the familiarity of likeness which we have been seeking for so long. It need not be too fancy or too flashy. All it needs to be is a good idea, cleverly executed. Source Code is a perfect example of that! Having heard a lot about the film, I still kept my expectations low. In comparison to the brand of cinema (in 3D, might I add) we've been witnessing lately, it wasn't surprising that people have developed a tendency of appreciating anything mediocre these days. What I saw, however, blew my mind away. Not because it was an extremely well crafted script, not because Jake Gyllenhaal performed spectacularly but because it managed to join the small list of films which I entitle as beautiful. Made on a reported budget of a mere 35 million dollars, it did what most of these so called blockbusters haven't managed to do, made me sit in one place for one and a half hour......in awe.
"Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes up to find himself on a train heading to Chicago. Although the other passengers all seem to know him, he has absolutely no idea where or even who he is. The last thing Colter remembers is flying a helicopter mission in Iraq, but here he is in someone else's life, being referred to as "Sean" by his traveling companion (Michelle Monaghan). Even the man in the mirror looks nothing like him. Before he can find out what's going on, an express train zooms by on the opposite track and a bomb on the train explodes.
Colter then wakes up in a chamber where an officer on the screen (Vera Farmiga) tells him that he has just returned from the "Source Code", a secret government project which lets him go back to the last 8 minutes of a person's life and re-live it. His job is to use those 8 minutes in order to find out who the bomber on the train was as that is their only key to saving the other places where the bomb has been planted.
The movie works on a large scale mostly due to the combined brilliant efforts of both the director and its lead actor. Jake Gyllenhaal displays a wonderful presence of character and has, after a long time given such a wonderful performance, supported well by the rest of the cast members which includes a surprise number in the form of Russel Peters. Also remarkable were the special effects which showed that YOU DO NOT NEED 3D TO MAKE A VISUALLY WELL SHOT FILM, but what works most for the film is its human element which manages to make an otherwise imperfect film, beautiful. Being a science fiction film it could well have gone down the path taken by most science-fiction films where good concept is traded off for action scenes and everything that could have helped it become a masterpiece is flushed down the drain. Instead, Source Code walks down a different path... it chooses to have a soul (a la Vanilla Sky, Blade Runner and Inception) Every time Colter goes back for eight minutes, it feels as if we are back for another short adventure, building our anticipation about what indeed we are going to find next. Director Duncan Jones manages to make a fast-paced gripping thriller and displays enough reasons why he will be the one to watch out for in the years to come! With every film, he is evolving into a fantastic direct0r. Moon suggested it and now Source Code confirms it too. That's 2/2 for you!
If Inception and now Source Code are anything to go by, rest assured this decade, might turn very well turn out to be the age of intelligent, thrilling science fiction movies.
Thank you Duncan Jones, for re-establishing my faith in the new breed of film directors. Not all's lost!!
Rating: 8/10
Written by Vikram Agarwal for MuvieMadlyDeeply.com