I must it, I wasn't sure about this when I first saw the trailer. But then when I saw Duncan Jones (formerly Zowie Bowie) was the director I decided I shouldn't worry so much. As with Duncan Jones' previous effort "Moon" the less you know about this the better.

My main concern when watching the trailer was, it seems, a negative by-product of the marketing team trying to make their movie appeal to a wider audience. The trailer made it look like Jake Gyllenhaal's main focus was going to be on saving Michelle Monaghan's character; a damsel-in-distress plot which I really wasn't interested in. It looks like this was an attempt to make the movie look more like a rom-com which, thankfully, it is not.

I would say that the movie looks rather too Hollywood-polished while not having enough of the cyber-punky feel we normally expect from this sort of movie. However, I think this may be because Duncan Jones is putting limits on himself somewhat. It's not like in The Matrix where all the simulation stuff can be made to look green with weird electronic whirring noises. The world created by the Source Code is supposed to look exactly like ours. Where Duncan Jones gets an opportunity for rather more creativity is the strange pod where the subject of the Source Code program is placed. For the most part, the rest of the movie has to look pretty much like an ordinary sunny day and, in Groundhog Day fashion, the same ordinary sunny day each time.

Like with Moon, this is a science-fiction movie about ideas rather than about explosions (though there are, ittedly, rather more explosions in this one than there were in Moon). The need to make everything look exactly like real life rather limits the stylishness too though. Moon was in a very furturistic-looking 2001-esque setting, but Source Code is ALL about the ideas and doesn't really get much opportunity to wow us with typical sci-fi visuals.

Comparing this to Groundhog Day feels a little unfair. Groundhog Day was a very clever movie and possibly one of the best comedies I have ever seen and it fit an awful lot of things into a fairly short time. By comparison Souce Code feels rather shorter and snappier. It's not such a complicated story. Also, I personally feel that I'd guessed who "the bad guy" was rather earlier than Gyllenhaal's character, but then again one of problems he faces is that the whole experience is disoreintating. Much more so for him than it is for the audience. The movie is more about the protagonist's struggles with his bizarre scenario than a whodunnit.

There was a certain point where I felt the movie was going to have to end, but the movie carried on past that point. I wasn't really at all sure where the story was going to at such a late stage, but I came out feeling very pleased with the final message of the movie.

While there's been some comparison to Christopher Nolan, the important difference is that Nolan loves complicated plots such as in "The Prestige" or "Inception" where there are an awful lot of threads that need to be tied up. Duncan Jones, so far, is showing a strength for telling simple but effective stories. There's been some criticism that not much is revealed about exactly how the Source Code is supposed to work, but that's precisely the point. Christopher Nolan might be more inclined to do a story with several threads exploring all the ins and outs of how the mcguffin functions (though even he doesn't focus on some elements, like why a strap around your wrist allows you to share dreams), but Duncan Jones' stories simply focus on one person's experience and leave the technological know-how on the same level as magic. That's what science fiction does sometimes and there's nothing wrong with that. We are told as much as we need to know.

Source Code is an excellent new sci-fi movie from director Duncan Jones and I hope to see many more such excellent sci-fi movies from him in the future. Loved it! :)

My review is here:
fatpie42.livejournal.com/101902.html