A Film Canon

With Source Code, Duncan Jones continues Moon's interest in futuristic, simulacral labour - and, while it lacks the stylistic-musical signature of the earlier film, it's considerably more interesting conceptually. In essence, it details the operation of a single invention, which allows the residual, post-mortem, neural rumblings of Private Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) to be transplanted into the last eight minutes in the life of a terrorist victim, for the sake of identifying the terrorist perpetrator. Not only can Stevens continually relive these eight minutes, which take place on a Chicago-bound train, but he can creatively interact with them, producing an idiosyncratic take on the convergence of cinematic and gaming aesthetics, in which the latter makes itself felt primarily through an ostensibly limitless horizon - the train is continually framed by expansive pans and tracking-shots - that conceals a whole host of invisible, local horizons, as if to evoke that point in a sandbox game at which the limits to autonomous exploration are surprisingly and suddenly reached. Positioned somewhere between Groundhog Day and The Lady Vanishes, Stevens' continual exploration of this space - which could have done with a little more of Ramis' radical repetition - creates a chamber drama that moves from spatial to temporal to neural parameters; a brain chamber drama, centred on an impressive reinvention of science fiction's perennial brainscape, in the form of a dim, flickering illusion of proprioception, an "electromagnetic vibration" somewhere between conscious and neural death that imagines consciousness itself as a kind of false limb. Alternatively, Jones presents a chamber drama, or a repetition-drama, built around a fragment of space-time, translating the frequent discussions and explanations of quantum mechanics into the difficulty of triangulating a criminal from the relative movement of two trains. At its strongest, it approaches the intensive impotence of the classic action film, transferring it from a post-Vietnam to a post-Afghanistan mileu, suggesting that physical recuperation is now not even possible in fantasy, and opting for a cerebral flexing that sits well with Gyllenhaal's muted physical presence, his narcissistic subsumption of physical agency. It's hard to say whether the ending lives up to the promise of the premise, and the temporal twist is a little tired - but this hardly seems important since, as one of the characters reminds us, the film is less preoccupied with time travel than with time management, less fascinated with revelation than with process, as if the spectacle of being present at your own death - the central, titillating paradox of time travel cinema - were exhausted and replaced with the yearning for death as naked singularity: "...any soldier would say that one death is service enough."