A version of this review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Proving definitively that his remarkable freshman effort, Moon, was anything but luck or chance, director Duncan Jones returns with Source Code, a less meditative and ambitious film than his last outing, but one which meets the criteria required of the very best mainstream entertainment in spades. Screenwriting teachers will tell you that if you don’t hook your audience in the first 10 minutes of a film, you’ve lost them for the full two hours. Jones and writer Ben Ripley have crafted a thriller that does it in only eight.

Army Captain Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) wakes up disoriented in the body of an unknown man on a train speeding toward Chicago. Colter is part of a mind-boggling government experiment called “The Source Code,” enabling participants to relive the last eight minutes of another person’s life. “It’s not time travel; it’s time reassignment,” he is told. His mission is to scour the train for a bomb and the terrorist who planted it; a much larger device is being set somewhere in downtown Chicago and the train bomber is the government’s only clue to where and when it will go off. Needless to say, Stevens’ window of opportunity is very narrow, forcing him to relive the man’s last eight minutes over and over again, an eight minutes that always ends in the same bath of molten fire and shredded steel. As Stevens barbells through multiple permutations of the event, gathering clues and unraveling the high-stakes mystery, he begins to suspect that those behind the extraordinary technology (Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright) may not have his best interests at heart.

Jones and Ripley must have read the work of theoretical physicist and string theorist Brian Greene before coming up with Source Code. In his book “The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos,” Greene hints at the possible existence of multiple universes (or multiverses), parallel to our own, in which various versions of ourselves carry on with our lives, each reality the product of the divergent decisions we make. Source Code is what happens when Groundhog Day goes sci-fi. And as with that philosophically heady comedy, this white-knuckle thriller throbs with limitless possibilities. In Source Code, there are do-overs and the chance to correct past mistakes.

If all this sounds a little bit tedious (and sometimes it is), just go with it. The metaphor of the train—a vehicle that travels on a predetermined track from which it cannot deviate—is perfect for a film that, while it plays as a smart, sci-fi thriller, is really a pulse-pounding meditation on predestination and fate (in this way, it is very similar to the superb The Adjustment Bureau a few weeks back). Is it possible to change our course or are we all hurtling, uncontrollably towards an inexorable destiny? Is happiness even possible when, by explosives or natural causes, death comes to us all? If you find that thought repugnant, so does Stevens. He cannot help but deviate from his mission to discover why and how he was assigned this duty and if, rather than simply gathering information, he can alter a future said to be immutable and unchangeable.

Source Code will entertain you—of that there is no doubt—but, if you let it, it will also allow you to address our corporate and individual human condition. Deeply humanistic and life affirming, this is exactly what science fiction does so well and why it is such a vital and muscular genre—it allows us to ask the really big questions in ways reality will not and cannot.

© Copyright 2011 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by Duncan Jones
Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Vera Farmiga, Michelle Monaghan, Jeffrey Wright

Rated PG-13 for some violence including disturbing language

Running Time: 93 minutes