Remorse Code

For once I would say trust the trailer on this one. Though The Guardian went mental and gave it five starts out of five (which was the only thing that convinced me to see it in the first place – damn you Peter Bradshaw!), I was waiting for Source Code to pick up or drop an unforeseen twist for a total of 93 excruciating minutes. And the site of Jake Gyllenhaal constantly thrown back into the same train carriage for the same eight minutes moved from being plain boring to in the end a little repugnant – I just wanted that bomb to go off.

Usually I’m not such a stickler for nerdy plot details, but if you’re going sci-fi thriller, you have to steer clear of scientific loop-holes, or at the very least try to offer some sort of feasible explanation of how a man can be transported back into the body of a dead train passenger (on numerous occasions) and faff about trying to discover a terrorist whilst being distracted by the soon to be love of his life after eight long minutes of soul-connecting attraction.

The film attempts to reveal exciting snippets bit-by-bit, the audience uncovering the explanation of this bizarre mission as the soldier himself does, but it just leads to the question – why didn’t they just tell him all that in the first place? Not only are the technical details difficult to believe, but the love story is too. I wasn’t a fan of Inception either for these reasons – but at least the stunning visuals and original cinematography acted as a distraction from a far from flawless plotline – unfortunately Source Code does not share this redeeming feature.

Far from the Bradshaw’s boasts that ‘Source Code is about conspiracies, altered minds and altered states, far-fetched in the most elegant and Hitchcockian way, and the sheer outrageousness of it all is muscular and streamlined’ I found the action overdone and boring.

Overall I was left disappointed by the director of Moon – expecting an intelligent sci-fi thriller I was left astounded by the sheer number of plot holes and lack of cinematic originality. You may leave thinking – ‘Oh wow, I’m confused!’ Don’t undersell your intelligence; it’s just that Source Code doesn’t make sense.