"source code" critique

“Source Code” is a movie released in 2011 starring Jake Gyllenhaal as “Captain Colter Stevens”. My critique is on a few scenes of the movie, where Stevens utilizes the internet on a smart phone, and how the information that he gathers from it significantly influences the rest of the movie.

Stevens starts out in a passenger train, utterly confused about his whereabouts. He is in midst of a conversation with a female acquaintance “Michelle”(Christina Warren), whom he doesn’t know. Stevens eventually realizes that he is in another man’s body. Soon after, the train explodes and Captain Stevens awakes in his own body strapped in a chair in a small unrecognizable chamber. Stevens is isolated inside a chamber, where Air Force Capt. Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) explains to Stevens through a computer screen that he is inside the Source Code, a program that allows him to take over someone's body in his or her last eight minutes of life. Captain Stevens mission is to locate the maker of a bomb, which exploded and destroyed a train headed into Chicago. Subsequently, Stevens is repeatedly sent back into the simulation, during which he repeatedly attempts to find out more and more about the bomb and the train’s passengers. He's told that he cannot truly alter the past to save any of the passengers, but that he must gather intel that can be used to alter the future and prevent a future attack.

Stevens has no memory of how he arrived to the mission. His last memory is of flying in a recent mission in Afghanistan while taking on enemy gunfire. Confused and frustrated, Stevens wonders how he got assigned to this project. Using the internet on a cellphone, he eventually discovers that he supposedly died in the war two months ago and that his severely injured body was apparently appropriated by the Air Force and used by Rutledge to enter the Source Code. This utilization of the internet is very realistic because a soldier’s death and the death of many other people is information that is often transmitted on the internet. It was especially interesting because the future internet was accessed by someone stuck in the past. Furthermore, it is significant that Captain Stevens was able to access the internet on a train, in which he was isolated because it means that the internet’s network has no boundaries and it is no longer necessary to get access to a computer plugged in to get access. Also, the phone Captain Stevens used was one he borrowed from another passenger, which is something I have done so in my life time and time again to access the internet, since I do not have a “smart phone”.

As the plot progresses and with the information Stevens has uncovered from previous trips into the Source Code, Stevens is able to defuse the bomb and capture the bomb maker, Derek Frost, before he can destroy the train. Frost is arrested by the police and the people on the train are saved. Stevens and Christina kiss in the last seconds before the plug is to be pulled at the eight-minute mark. In that instant, Goodwin turns off his life support per his request, but to Stevens' surprise, his mind remains in Sean Fentress' body. He was able to safely leave the train with Christina and the rest of the passengers. Now in the alternate universe, where the bomb was defused, the alternate version of Goodwin receives an email from Stevens explaining what has happened and how the Source Code works by connecting (or creating) alternate realities. The alternate version of Goodwin gets the letter before she is even aware of the operation or of the bomb that will explode on the train later that day. Stevens asks her to listen to him and consider his requests once her communication begins with the Colter Stevens inside the chamber she soon will find out about. Stevens once again utilizes the internet to communicate to Goodwin because he suspected of the alternate universe and the email is something he suspected would be preserved. The email is used as evidence of the alternate universe converging the realms of the internet and reality itself.