There was a whole glut of these movies back in the day, low-to-midbudget studio movies with a refreshing focus on intellectualism (this came out the same year as Limitless and The Adjustment Bureau), and I critics at the time going hogwild over them. It makes sense - these are the people who had been forced to go see every Transformer movie, and they were hungry for a cultural shift - and I the notion of "Has Inception made mainstream movies smarter??!?" popping up in a couple of places. That didn't last, and now we have superhero movies out the wazoo. Shame.

I saw Source Code a few years ago, and my memory of it was as "a really smart, fun movie that totally shot itself in the foot at the end there. Like, not even the ending, but literally just the final five minutes totally cratered the whole thing." And while that's still true - we'll get to it - my big revelation this rewatch was I wasn't super enamored with the body of the movie either anymore. I'd say I'm hoping this isn't a pattern with Duncan Jones, having just rewatched Moon and not loved it all that much, but according to conventional wisdom, I'm out of good movies with him. This was it, and after this it's a video game adaptation and...a weird space pedophile thing? Uh oh.

Actually, having watched this so closely in conjunction with Moon, I came away with a whole bunch of connections; some purely aesthetic, some plot-related, and some that kinda explain why I wasn't as taken with this anymore. First off, beyond just being sci-fi, the stories are very similar: both Moon and Source Code are about very lonely men trapped in a deeply repetitious cycle of labor, working towards a goal that the powers-that-be are keeping deliberately, frustratingly nebulous for him. Both men eventually discover that all is not as it appears - specifically they are not all that they appear - and that their nature makes them inherently ripe for exploitation by their handlers. However both men (spoiler) manage to escape by winning over the basic humanity of one of their handlers, and find themselves facing an uncertain future, but one with more possibilities than the life they left behind.

The main difference between the films is their aesthetic approaches; as many critics pointed out at the time, this movie was pretty clearly positioning itself as Duncan Jones' more mainstream followup to his arty, idiosyncratic first film. Whereas Moon was sparse, grey and monotone, this movie is infused with that very specific late-2000s/early-2010s blockbuster oversaturation, has loads and loads of characters, and a plot that has the main character fall in love with a woman, stop a bad guy, and grow as a person. And yet I'd unfortunately have to say that my response to this movie emotionally was about the same as my response to Moon just the other day; I appreciated it, and I appreciated the ideas, but the viewing experience was a curiously remote one.

I hate to say it, but I think the problem has to do with Jones; I'm not getting the sense that this dude has super keen story sense. Like, he's clearly enamored with the ideas and concepts, and more power to him for that; more people should have that kind of imagination. But neither Moon or Source Code had stories that progressed very well; Source Code especially had a terrorist plot that felt very low-stakes. The idea of this guy caught in a Groundhog Day situation where he has eight minutes to figure out who's going to blow up a train before it happens is FANTASTIC, but Jake Gyllenhaal takes an oddly desultory approach towards actually figuring out what's going on, spending several cycles just kind of faffing about instead of gathering clues and evidence for next time. There's precious little momentum to his investigation, no sense of escalation; Vera Farmiga keeps telling him to "stop wasting time," but we never get the sense of what the stakes or timeframe actually are. And any progress he does make isn't born out of anything he did on his previous attempts; the solution is less him figuring it out, and more a process of elimination at that point.

That lack of story sense extends to things beyond the scope of the investigation; when Gyllenhaal finally calls his dad at the end, it's not because his character has reached a point where he's ready to say goodbye or whatever, it just happens arbitrarily because the movie's at a point where it's close enough to the end that it makes sense for him to do that now. That's the reason the ending wasn't the movie-ruiner it had been in the past; yes, the thing absolutely should have stopped at the roving freezeframe, and everything afterwards muddies the waters to such an extent as to make the movie lowkey incomprehensible, but the movie up till that point hadn't been operating on as firm a ground as I ed.