'Source Code' dissected

'Are we expected to believe this?'

'Source Code' shouldn't really work. The film has the hero inhabit another person's reality for the same ten-minute period, not once, but repeatedly; we are told that the events we are seeing are the events as remembered by the dying brain of the victim of a train bomb; moreover, the memories themselves aren't static - our hero is able to interact with them so that the events play out differently each time, rather like he's travelling back in time repeatedly. Meanwhile, the hero we are seeing interact with these remembered events is actually lying comatose in a box.

Somehow the film-makers convince us to suspend our disbelief, so that during the watching of the film we accept all sorts of preposterous ideas simply because of the compelling and efficient way they are told. 

Here are some thoughts on how they make the story believable.

An explanation that makes dramatic sense (even if the science is iffy)

If the film-makers presented us with the 'realities' of the film up front, the film wouldn't work. Of course, the whole point of these 'realities' is that they are the discoveries and twists that generate the interest of the film. The key thing to learn here is that you can get away with a fantastical basis to your plot when you take time to establish it, and when you make it a central part of your plot, rather than a hurried explanation.

By way of contrast, remember how they bring back Sean Connery's character from the dead in Highlander 2? As I recall, they explain it with a conversation between Christopher Lambert and Sean in the past, where CL is told 'if ever you need me, I will find you'. Not exactly watertight dramatically. The explanation has to be believable for the audience to keep investing their attention in the rest of the film.

Sean and Christopher clearly disgruntled by the lack of a believable explanation

The hero is the representative of the audience

A common dramatic device used in Source Code is simply to have the audience discover things at the same pace as the main character. What I mean is, the main character is essentially the surrogate for the viewer.

For instance, they open the film with the hero waking up /coming to in the middle of a conversation with a woman opposite him. This man doesn't know why he's on a train, how he got there, why this woman opposite him is talking to him like she knows him well. When he goes to the washroom and looks in the mirror, he sees another person who looks nothing like him.  The audience is as confused as the central character is.

The ten minute period plays itself out, then there's an explosion as the train blows up with him on it. Finally, he wakes up somewhere else altogether completely disorientated.  He didn't need to wake up disorientated, but it suits the writer's purposes because this way the hero can ask the questions that the audience is thinking. ie What just happened? How can I have survived a train blast like that? How come the person I was on the train wasn't actually me?

If the film was to portray the reality of how the hero is communicating with the Vera Farmiga character, again, it just wouldn't seem plausible. In reality, the hero is communicating using a part of his brain and the words he is thinking appear on a screen in front of her. But this would be difficult to show in a way that hold any interest on a cinema screen. Instead, during most of the film the hero appears to be inside a pod or machine communicating with VF via an interactive screen (the pod turns out to be a construct of his imagination).

(He could at least have imagined some more stylish clothes for himself)

Development of the story arcs

The main plot strand, of course, is about finding the identity of the bomber. Another important strand is the business about 'where' the hero actually is in physical reality - is he still in Iraq, do the authorities know where he is, does his Dad know he's still alive? Then there are parallel strands with the two leading ladies - his growing attachment to one of the female passengers who died, and also his getting to know the Vera Farmiga character. This is important for the denouement, where this last character disobeys orders to send the hero back to the train one final time.

Then there's the hero's relationship with his Father, and the unresolved issues there - the writer is careful to tidy these up by having the hero speak to his father on the phone, and pretending to report his own dying words of reconciliation.

Finally, there's the strand that concerns the actual Source Code program itself, and whether it's ethical to do what they're doing (the character of Dr Rutledge is suitably shifty and self-serving).

These arcs are the elements that give structure to the film - they are what the writer hangs the film on.

Making use of the right twist

It's perhaps interesting that there are various twists the writer chose not to have as the central denouement. For instance, he could have had the hero himself unexpectedly turn out to be the bomber, or his female companion, or both of them - which he doesn't do.

Today's audience is used to watching films and TV with twists (Usual Suspects, Saw, Sixth Sense, Lost), so the writer's task is made more complicated by the fact the audience is used to second guessing the writer - 'Is all this taking place in Purgatory?' 'Is the hero already dead?' 'Is this all just one big set-up?'  The twist needs to be unexpected, but also satisfying. At the same time, the problem with having a big twist is that it carries the weight of all that has gone before it - the rest of the film stands or falls by it.  The eventual twist in Source Code is effective because it's not really a twist at all, just a satisfying paradox about the nature of reality and alternate realities.

And finally ...

A few final thoughts. It occurred to me that Source Code is very much of its time and place. Had it been released a decade ago, I think there would have been too great a leap of imaginative faith for audience to make. So I think the film owes a debt to the conventions as established in eg computer games (where the character can get killed many times over), in eg The Matrix (where the physical reality the character senses and experiences is an illusion), in eg Quantum Leap and Being John Malkovich (the idea of inhabiting another person's body), and in eg Groundhog Day (where the same time period is lived over and over again).

PS

Did you catch sight of that reflection at the end of the film - I'm presuming it was an image of a giant rabbit? (cf Donnie Darko)???