8 minutes to blast off!

Rating: 8/10 (7 August 2011)

***SPOILERS*** Finding himself on a commuter train heading for Chicago US Army helicopter pilot Capt. Colter Stevens, Jack Gyllenhaal,is a bit confused in him sitting next to pretty and adoring Christina Warren, Michelle Monaghan, who's talking all kinds of mombo-jumbo talk, about the course of human existence, to him which he has absolutely no idea about! Not knowing what to do or say Colter, whom Michelle refers to as her guru and teacher in Far Eastern psychic studies Sean Fentress, gets up and goes to the train's washroom to get his thoughts together when all of a sudden a bomb explodes that ends up killing everyone on the train!
As if waking up from a nightmare Colter then finds himself in a sealed capsule being communicated with by US Army Captain Colrleen Goodwin, Vera Farmiga, who tells a shocked and confused Colter that he's in fact dead killed in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan two months ago! Goodwin tells Colter that his brain has been kept active in order to put him on a super secret mission that he's not expected to come out alive from! Since he's not really alive, Colter is on life-support, to being with in the first place that fact doesn't seem to bother him!
This mission that he's in no condition to reject is to become Sean Fentress and prevent the detonation of a nuclear device in downtown Chicago. The train that Colter is on now he's told by Goodwin and her boss Dr. Rutledge, Jeffery Wright, is already gone together with the some 200 or so passengers on it! But Colter is given a window of opportunity to prevent that, the future Chicago nuclear explosion, from happening by him discovering and preventing the man who's to set it off in him using the train explosion as a diversion: An 8 minute time loop that was invented by the super secret project "Beleaguered Castle" that both Capt. Goodwin & Dr. Rutledge work for. Taking advantage of the time loop Colter can relive those critical 8 minutes as many times as he want's until he finally gets it right! In that way Colter can find out who placed the bomb on the train and thus prevent him from doing far greater damage in nuking the entire city of Chicago and end up killing hundreds of thousands if not as much as a million innocent people!
A real mind blowing like movie with Captain Colter Stevens going back and forth in time,the 8 minute time loop, about a half dozen times in order to find out who's responsible for the train explosion only to end up falling in love with Michelle and not only wanting to prevent the nuclear blast that's to level Chicago in the future but prevent the train explosion that already happened that ended up killing her! Being told by Capt.Goodwin & Dr. Rutledge that he can't change what already happened Colter still tries his best to do exactly that.
****SPOILERS**** To paraphrase a quote from a famous 1960's sci-fi TV series Colter in his determination to both go back and forth in time and change the outcome of both past and future events in the end ended up succeeding on both counts! What Colter in fact ended up doing was to participate in a great mind as well as time bending adventure. An experience of psychic phenomena that reached from the depths of his innermost mind to the very other limits of physical reality!