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Reality Still Hasn't Caught Up to This 2011 Sci-Fi Thriller Starring Jake Gyllenhaal

If Groundhog Day were a sci-fi thriller, it might’ve looked something like this.

By Benjamin Bullard
Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) appears confused on a train in Source Code (2011).

Bleeding-edge technology, at least as it’s shown at the movies, hasn’t yet eclipsed the ambitious outer limits of fiction set for it by Source Code (streaming here on Peacock), despite almost 14 years having passed since the film’s original 2011 release.

A crime-solving science fiction thriller with serious structural kinships to Groundhog Day and Memento, Source Code repeatedly sweeps the rug of reality out from under its main character (a U.S. Army captain named Colter Stevens, played by Jake Gyllenhaal) to hit the reset switch on a single virtual reality scenario — one in which Stevens’ ability to iterate on what he remembers from past play-throughs could make all the difference in averting a major domestic terrorist strike.

Jake Gyllenhaal in Source Code: mastering virtual space with real-world stakes

That’s the clinical, bare-bones setup for Source Code, which takes its name from the movie’s advanced, government-supported VR project that uses Stevens as its chief experimental human guinea pig. Right from the start, we’re thrust into the film with the same confused and reeling sense of disorientation that also afflicts Stevens. Like some fragment from within a dream, he’s suddenly sitting inside a commuter train heading toward Chicago, a warm-hearted woman named Christina (Michelle Monaghan) appears to be a familiar ride-along acquaintance (who for some reason keeps calling him “Sean”), and when he sees his reflection in the train’s restroom mirror — well — it definitely looks like he’s some other guy.

Stevens hardly has enough time to get his bearings on the train before it violently explodes, killing everyone on board and yanking his consciousness out of the now-completed train-loop scenario and placing him back inside what (he thinks) is his actual reality. As we soon find out, he isn’t taking part in this whole VR playback scheme willingly; in fact, Stevens doesn’t really know where his real-world self is located or even how he ended up assisting law enforcement in solving a crime. All he knows is that he’s stuck inside a dark, cramped pod whose only link to his outside handlers comes via a screen-and-speaker AV interface, and that his most recent real-life memories stem not from the events of the VR scene they keep forcing him to walk through, but from an explosive incident in Afghanistan that threatened the lives of his Army unit.

Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) lays on the ground in a grey nondescript location in Source Code (2011).

What’s really going on here? The film only half-explains the fictional far-fetched tech that allows Stevens to exert some control over what happens inside its looping, iterative VR snippet. Viewers eventually learn that the real Stevens — or at least what’s left of him — actually did sustain near-fatal injuries in the Afghanistan incident he keeps remembering, and that he’s been flagged by the Source Code project director (played by Jeffrey Wright) as the most viable candidate to serve as a make-or-break neural link between the project’s scripted VR environment and the outside world. For Stevens, the outside world might not even be much of an appealing place in any case. All that seems to await him there is a small government research team, urgently berating him for fresh dispatches every time they yank him out of his VR loop and (mysteriously) being stingy with any information that might hang some useful context around his actual, real-world circumstances.

As it turns out, everyone on board Stevens’ virtual train was recently a real, living person who lost their lives in an actual explosion (which occurred only hours earlier), and the Source Code project is able to compile the final eight minutes of their collective memories to virtually recreate the moments leading up to the event. His handlers aren’t interested in preventing the explosion that kills everyone — in the real world, after all, it’s a tragedy that’s already happened. Instead, they want Stevens to nose around inside the VR train for clues about the bomb and its operator, because they suspect the blast is a mere precursor to a much bigger mass dirty bomb detonation that’s intended to kill millions in Chicago sometime very soon.

Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan) stare at each other closely in Source Code (2011).

If the thriller and mystery-solving aspects were all there were to Source Code’s story, it would still be a terrific flick — solely for the way it deftly navigates those threads alone. But as its later chapters prove, this is a movie that has much more on its mind, especially when it comes to teasing out technology’s role in shifting the natural boundaries of human consciousness, and in questioning the ethics of human responsibility for the choices people make once they’re calling the shots within a virtual space. 

Better than that, Source Code also has a heart. It’s easy to see why this small-budget movie attracted stars like Gyllenhaal, Monaghan, Wright, and Vera Farmiga (who plays the real-world Source Code operator with whom Stevens, from the other side of his virtual reality wall, eventually forms an unspoken bond). Directed by Duncan Jones (Moon, Warcraft, Mute) and beautifully written by Ben Ripley (the Species franchise, Flatliners) to follow the film’s high-concept tech breadcrumbs to their poignant emotional conclusions, Source Code finds genuinely optimistic and redemptive hope within what seems like certain tragedy — even, in the end, if it stretches the limits of what science currently allows in order to get us there.

Then again, in this movie, breaking beyond what science currently allows is kind of the whole point. As Source Code nears its end, Stevens begins to recognize the power that his mind holds over the constructed mechanisms that had previously imprisoned him (a theme that’ll likely resonate with fans of Dark City). It leads to a moment of technological transcendence, a surprising story pivot that takes smart advantage of one of science fiction’s most distinctive promises: the hopeful, what-if inclination to ponder big-picture themes... with no constraints on what the limits of the real world permit us to imagine.

Source Code is streaming on Peacock here.