Source Code: A Review

Blue Gal and I went to see "Source Code" today.

Oh boy!

Blue Gal said many clever and insightful things, including remarking that Jake Gyllenhaal has the piercing blue eyes of a Paul Ryan "but without all the creepiness".

Which is certainly unimpeachably true.

In the longer-form category, Roger Ebert penned this review that I liked pretty well, especially for all the things it didn't say: all the points Roger generously omits creates a space for me to write something that was not simply a repetition of points Roger had already made far better than I ever could.

Which was nice of him.

I'll stick to three.

First, a purely science fictional gripe. Roger didn't mention the internal inconsistency of the movie's Fake Science. I like well-crafted time travel stories and know first-hand how tricky it is to both do something new with the idea and tidy up every loose end, so I don't mind a little Treknobabble to spackle over the raw edges of the non-science. But I do mind when a movie violates its own premises. Not to reveal any spoilers, but if our hero, Captain Colter Stevens, only has access to the universe of data that a) he is being given by his handlers and, b) whatever was in his doppleganger's head up until the moment the Very Bad Thing happened, he cannot then turn around and use a smart phone to search the internet for information to which no one in this "bubble universe" could possibly have access.

All the flux capacitors in the world do not allow the Mona Lisa to reach past her frame and grab a ham sandwich off the museum guard's desk.

Second, Roger didn't mention that Scott "Quantum Leap" Bakula plays the voice of Captain Stevens' father, which was a nice little touch.

But third, and most importantly, Roger missed that "Source Code" was clearly an attempt at creating a "Coming Home" or "Deer Hunter" or "First Blood" for our Afghanistan (and Iraq) veterans: a small, bittersweet "Welcome Home, Soldier" flick for all the parades they never got and will never get.

As was done in "First Blood", all of the real-world tropes that are seeping into our national consciousness as soon-to-be standard elements in the story of the forgotten veterans of our Forever War on Terror are present. And as in "First Blood", they have been turned loose in a new landscape to find different endings.

There is the Pasty Libertarian with his Stars-a-Stripes WMD who wants to remake the world by wiping out all the inconvenient lesser beings who are all presumably keeping him from getting laid.

There is the Capable, Beautiful Woman -- the symbol of civilization and all that must be protected -- who the hero fails over and over again (for some reason -- probably because half the movie is centered around a train, I could not help but think of Claudia Cardinale's "Jill McBain" from "Once Upon a Time in the West")

There is the Morally Crippled Neocon who has never served in the military but has all kinds of exotic, amoral ideas about how the lives of soldiers can be used up in the service of his career (and who has a prepping-his-hair-for-the-camera moment that absolutely had to be a call-back

to this little freak-show.)

There is our hero's Fellow Soldier, who follows ever-more painful orders from her relentless civilian authorities as her conscience boils along underneath her professional exterior. She is the only one to whom our hero cat talk "soldier to soldier" and the only was capable of truly thanking him for his sacrifice.

And, finally, there is Captain Stevens, the Soldier-as-Noble-Problem-Solver: underappreciated, shorn of family, near-fatally wounded in his service to his country, still trying to "save the world" and who is being "stop-lossed" in the cruelest way imaginable by the civilian authorities who have no regard for the Hell they are putting him through.

Also the ending was abrupt and weak did not render proper respect to what had gone before it, and Chicago was filmed as such an Oz of impossible beauty that it made "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" look like the last reel of "The Devil's Rain".



Overall, a solid C+ B+.*

Or maybe a C++ :-)

* (Commenters have convinced me that I'm too harsh a grader, even though it does slightly spoil the joke :-)