Tuesday, April 05, 2011

Source Code and The Beatles

Last Saturday I went to the movies with some friends.  As always, my best friend chose the movie, this time, "Source Code".  The premise of the movie is simple, but garbled with a lot of mumbo jumbo:  you can tap into the lingering conscience of a dead person and experience their last eight minutes on this Earth.  As expected, the military forces had developed a mechanism to use this.  In the specific case of "Source Code", it is to discover a terrorist that has planted a bomb in a train and also has a dirty bomb for Chicago.

What, are we going to die again?

One of my problems with the movie came the first time we see/live through the eight minutes (and we suffer through the eight minutes several times), because I was able to pinpoint who the terrorist was (it was pretty obvious), which spoiled the movie for me.  Moreover (and this is something I also deplore of the Harry Potter movies in their pensieve scenes), if you are tapping into somebody's conscience, are you not restricted by what that person saw or felt during those eight minutes?  Aren't we supposed to only see what that person saw?  Then, how come we followed Jake Gyllenhaal to a train station (he was following an Indian or Arabic guy), and then see the train explode in the distance when he was supposed to be inside the train?  How can they tap the lingering conscience of a dead person who was never at that station during his last eight minutes alive?  Be advised that the last scenes of the movie try to explain this (for me the explanation came too late in the movie).

These issues took me out of the movie.  Hence, I couldn't enjoy it to the fullest.  Nonetheless, the acting was very strong throughout.  I give a shout out to Vera Farmiga, who did not really have a fully developed character as written, but she made wonders with what little she had.

As a curious note, in the final credits Eleanor Rigby was credited (I think).  In her honor, the following Beatles' song from The Yellow Submarine movie (which is appropriate due to the state of Jake's character):


6.5 stars out of 10.

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