"Tell me everything's gonna be okay"

Movie Review: The Source Code (4/5 stars rating)

"I'm going to shoot you because you have a more impressive beard than me."

I went for a movie review last night organised by omy.sg on The Source Code - a science fiction action thriller.

With a synopsis of a decorated military pilot on a mission inside a dead person's mind to gather clues of the possible terrorist who bombed a train, it got me intrigued.

The story goes like this:

Decorated military helicopter pilot Captain Colter Stevens (acted by Jake Gyllenhaal), woke up being another man, a man he do not know and he could not remember why he was even there in the first place. He was in a train and he has a lady companion and the train explodes 8 minutes after he woke.

After the explosion, Captain Stevens was brought back to reality. Here, he finds out that he is trapped in a chamber and someone is speaking to him through a screen monitor. He manages to gather information that he is part of a mission to gather clues of the possible terrorist in the train in the last 8 minutes of a victim's mind, a memory that still exists.

He gathers more information each time he is sent back and he edges towards finding the terrorist and he also finds out more about his present situation whenever he is out of the source code. (Movie spoiler coming up)

Captain Goodwin and the creator of Source Code - a bastard (watch the show to find out why)

He finds out he was pronounced dead by the military after his last failed mission in Afghanistan but he is not brain dead. Connecting his active brain to the scource code, a new military experiement, the military is able to send Captain Stevens back in the memory of this victim in the train, but only the last 8 minutes of his life as anything longer would not be captured as vividly.

Throughout the many times he was sent back, he realised that the people in the scource code, even though strictly speaking are just fragments of a memory and thus shouldn't exist, are in fact more real than people might think. They respond differently to different situations and Captain Stevens began to want to save these innocent people on the train, regardless if they were merely fragments.

And so after he manages to save all the people on the train in his last time back to the scource code, he was prepared to die as was promised by the military. And he kissed Christina passionately just before his 8 minutes were up. He then finds out that after the 8 minutes were up, he continued staying IN the source code - proving that the discovery of the source code is not just sending a person back into a memory, but creating an alternate universe altogether.

It gives us the audience the pleasure of a surprise pleasant ending when we are expecting the worst. I love it!

Everytime he dies, he asked his female companion Christina to tell him "Everything's gonna be okay". And this line sticks to become the very last line of the movie as well.