The biggest problem I have with Source Code isn’t even in the movie. It’s in the other movie reviews I read for it that use this movie to launch an attack on Inception, saying both movies are convoluted and make no sense when you really think about them. As a tired defender of Inception, this pisses me off. Inception’s dream world landscape made perfect sense (it’s weird that a lot of big name critics act like they’re scientifically retarded and pretend they’re unable to understand anything in a science fiction film but then try to be cinematically snobby a paragraph later) and was actually much easier to follow than most viewers gave it credit for.
Source Code, on the other hand, has an ending that makes no sense. It tries to rewrite the boundaries of what’s scientifically possible, and therefore almost falls apart in its last ten minutes. In a way, I guess the biggest problem I have with Source Code is in Source Code.
What Works: The actual plot (a soldier has to relive the same 8 minutes of a train crash over and over until he can find the bomber) is so nifty, it took me a minute to realize the filmmakers weren’t really committing to it. By that I mean they didn’t make our heads spin enough with the narrative possibilities, instead letting the pseudo-science confuse us. Jake Gyllenhaal is also pretty good here, and the movie scores a few solid scenes of suspense before the bomber is revealed.
What Doesn’t Work: Who the bomber is bored me. And the last five minutes didn’t make any sense, and I understand science. So I can’t just pull a typical movie critic and say “It was Math or Science and made my head hurt,” it just doesn’t work as an ending. It cheats the science of the movie to create a happy ending cop-out.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Ended on a long freeze frame the movie commits right before it goes off the rails. Also, made the bomber more interesting, as well as teased that part out a little more. There are actually only a handful of times Jake’s character goes back in time before finding the bomber, and I think they should have shown us more times. Really had fun with him going crazy trying to find this bomber. As is, the movie really isn’t long enough (I rarely say that) and takes place too much off the train that needed to be more of a claustrophobic setting.