Sunday, April 3, 2011
DEPENDING ON YOUR PERSPECTIVE, IT'S EITHER FORTUNATE OR UNFORTUNATE THAT THE MOVIE WAS NOT MADE UP ENTIRELY OF ONES AND ZEROES: Based on requests received via Twitter and Facebook, there's desire for a thread to discuss Source Code, which I really liked for the first 80% and am not sure how I felt about the end, which seemed to me to be a case of the movie wanting to have its cake (following the "rules" set up earlier in the film) and eat it too (to have a happy ending). And even though I didn't recognize the voice that has a small but important cameo, it was a nice tribute to a prior work that's a clear influence on the film. Comments will be a spoiler zone, so tread carefully.
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<p><span>I loved it and while I'm not sure the ending played by the rules of the film, it's not like anything was well grounded in science to begin with. Plus I think one could interpret the ending as existing solely in the alternate reality while in the real world the train was still destroyed and Jake Gyllenhaal was still dead. I do think that a different ending would have been better (the film could have just stopped at the point when time froze) but I'm not going to let a minor complaint detract from what was overall a good film.</span>
ReplyDelete</p>
Which voice? The father? Now I'm really hoping it was Bill Murray. Must go check.
ReplyDeleteOk, I found it. Less cool for me, but that's because I wasn't a fan of that influence. I certainly see why it's a cool homage.
ReplyDeleteSo, if we take the very end at face value, what is it that happened? Surely Jake didn't prevent the explosion for real -- there's no implication of time travel. So, somehow, using the detritus of dying neural circuits, he helped create a parallel reality in which the train didn't blow up? (As Matt says, it just doesn't work. But my question is what the theory is supposed to be.)
ReplyDeleteHere's my take -
ReplyDeleteThere's an Alpha Reality, which we can take to be the one you and I are in right now. That's the one at the beginning of the movie, in which the train absolutely explodes. In that one, when Goodwin allows the clock to count down at the end, Sgt. Colter Stevens dies. What we see after that, the continuation of his story (the train not blowing up) and including the text message to Goodwin is either his afterlife or an alternate reality. Take your pick. Either way, back in the original reality, our own timeline, Stevens is very much dead.
That's why the very very last twist, the text message and its implications felt unnecessary to me. Mind you, it didn't ruin the movie or anything, but I just didn't need it.
That being said, I really, really liked the movie and would recommend it.
I agree with this take. Basically, every time Jake was sent in, it was the creation of an alternate reality, but that was meaningless to him as his inhabited body kept dying. Notice that the expiration of the 8 minutes didn't actually pull his consciousness out of those alternate realities, because he lived in those alternate realities for longer than 8 minutes when he wasn't killed by the explosion (e.g., when hit by the train). That fact seems to undercut what military thought they were doing, and I think the purpose of the text message was to tell Goodwin this (maybe)?
ReplyDeleteI didn't really like the ending very much, as it seemed too happy (I read someone on Twitter comparing it to the Bruce Willis bit at the end of the Player, which is exactly right), though I wonder if there is a more clever/satsifying reading of it. Of course, Jake's happy ending, basically, leaves him as a body kidnapper who wiped another consciousness off the planet out of his own selfishness, so I guess that's a little dark.
I think I would have been much happier if the movie stuck to its premise, and Jake was only able to surf along the actual consciousnesses of the actual people during the actual 8 minutes. I'm a scifi guy, so I have no problem with alternate realities, or even time travel, but that wasn't the import of the quantum mumbo jumbo we were being fed by Jeffrey Wright. Don't get me wrong -- it was a fun movie. I just thought that it tried to hard to give a little mindf*** at the end. (Actually, I think it would have been a better movie if it spent more time on Jake trying to figure out what happened -- even going back many more times if needed -- and less time on Jake's own story.)
ReplyDeleteP.S. There should be a rule that Amherst alums can't play bad guys.
P.P.S. Did everyone get the preview suggesting that "You haven't experienced The Three Musketeers unless you've experienced it in 3D (just as Dumas intended)!!"?)
If the "happy ending" (he saves the train, lives happily ever after with Christina) is only his afterlife or an alternate reality, I have no problem with it. If we're supposed to think that the last trip was a successful excursion backwards in time that changed that "Alpha Reality" I mentioned above, then I have a problem with it. Especially because it collapses into one of those time travel paradoxes that makes my brain hurt.
ReplyDeleteYes, we got the Three Musketeers 3-D preview, which at least looks better than the Mena Suvari/Karev from Grey's Anatomy wire-fu version we got a few years ago. Still, not the worst preview I had attached, which was "Jumping The Broom," which, despite the presence of Julie Bowen, I am clearly not the intended audience for.
ReplyDeleteI guess, contra Watts, I'm dissatisfied with both of those options. If "alternate reality," it's contrary to the rules of the movie (unless you say that Wright was just wrong about the very nature of the source code, which is possible but seems like a stretch, and warrants more explanation). If "afterlife," then it's too cheap -- I mean, ANY movie could end with a coda in which good things happen to the protagonists in their "afterlife."
ReplyDeleteAs my twitter friends know, I loved loved LOVED this movie. Totally agree with all the issues re: the ending (though to me, the point of the trip where he gets off the train and then is hit by it was to prove that he can exist beyond 8 minutes in the source code), but I cared about Jake's character so much at that point that I just really wanted a happy ending so I let it slide. Watts - I definitely read it as an alternate reality, not as changing the fabric of the original reality...
ReplyDeleteI also really loved all the humor Duncan Jones injected into the film (which wasn't really in the script) - there were so many moments that the trailer/commercials played as SUPER SERIOUS that in the movie actually were more like Jake saying something serious and everyone else being like "are you on drugs?" which I really enjoyed. Excited to see where Jones goes as a director from here.
(And Matt, thanks for the thread!)
Russ, I thought Jake told Goodwin in his text message explicitly that jeffrey Wright misunderstood the nature of the Source Code, so I'm not sure it's a stretch that it's an alternate reality). I guess it may be a bit of a cheat, but mad-scientist-doesn't-fully-grasp/can't-control-his-own-creation strikes me as enough of a genre trope that the shear genre-trope-i-ness of it all sort of did the work for me.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I agree with everything you said above about thinking the "mind-f@#k" didn't really work and that it would've been better if the movie didn't waste so much time on trying make Jake's character happen. By the way, did anyone else think Jake G was kind of terrible in this movie?
When I wrote my last comment, I started writing a little digression on how they tried to preempt this line of criticism that way, but it got too bulky, so I deleted it. In short, the idea that a scientist constructed one type of technology that did a certain thing based on short-term memory and it in fact did something completely different that wasn't about memory at all was just a bridge too far for me. That's not "technology gets used in unexpected way and wrecks everything" (I might call this the "Ice 9" approach, but it's been too long since I've read Cat's Cradle). It's a complete substitution: "You *thought* you were writing a brief about why the DC Circuit should overturn the EPA's rule, but in fact you were writing The Barber of Seville II!"
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that Jones wanted to end it when time froze and they tested it and people were confused/depressed so the studio made them add the end.
ReplyDeleteTo be honest, it didn't really made sense to me that it was purely about memory, because Jake clearly interacted with his environment (and altered other characters behavior) so it was always more than some pensieve-type of experience.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that if you have characters reacting in new and different ways to new and different stimulae (which Goodwin and Wright's character assumed was possible with Source Code, given their instructions to Jake), then I think it's a semantic conversation whether it's called a parallel universe or something else. I think this is particularly true when there doesn't seem to be anyway for our world to interact with the parallel worlds spun out by every new jump (this isn't Fringe).
I have a different take, and mine might be to liken this to a computer RPG, whether of the old Infocom variety or what I assume to be the much more advanced (but, importantly, not "online") version thereof. I think there's some "logic" to the idea that the memory circuits, taken as a whole, import the baseline assumptions, personalities, etc. of the people involved, so that Jake could interact with personalities as they existed and would have responded to them. He can go through the "board" 100 times and have 100 different experiences, all based on preprogrammed information (the non-online computer RPG). But nobody would say that Ultima IV creates a parallel universe.
ReplyDeleteI understand what you're saying, but didn't view the film as saying as much (Goodwin was clear that what Jake was entering was not a simulation, which I took to be a closed programming loop). Then again, I don't think that the film was rigorous with its sci fi, and so don't think the answer is really in the provided text. In other words, as we discuss this I'm realizing that I, too, was disappointed with the film, but my disappointment stems from the film in its entirety rather than just the end.
ReplyDeleteInteresting interview w/Duncan Jones here where he pretty definitively says what happens at the end:
ReplyDeletehttp://io9.com/#!5788795/duncan-jones-unravels-the-mysteries-behind-source-code
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