Film Fan Friday Flashback!

And where do we flash back to, exactly? Last Friday! And, specifically, to Source Code. Folks, I think this one has the secret of the universe in it.

I love it, I really do. It's a good year for sci-fi fans already, if you've got material as good as The Adjustment Bureau and Source Code. It's only April! I loved Duncan Jones' Moon, the movie that got a tiny release two years ago, but is the reason this one opened wide, so I was a little apprehensive when I read a crappy review in the local indy paper, but I had been curious enough by the previews I'd seen, I had to give it a chance. I'm glad I did.

The opening has some of the best atmospheric shots I've ever seen. If this were an IMAX flick, I would have developed vertigo. And that's not even the thrust of the movie! Most of it is in confined spaces, either on the train, the military base, or the capsule, and each of those are memorable locations for those who have already seen this one. Anyway, and so I don't bog you down with stars so much as wow you with starpower movie making, I'll just stick with explaining what makes it so fantastic. Yes, it actually does play a lot like Moon, and yes, a little like Groundhog Day, and a whole lot of Star Trek reboot episodes, but it transcends all of them, it really does. It's brilliant. You walk out of it trying to figure it out, but here's the secret.

Trust Jake. Ignore Jeffrey. Jake's the real expert, or becomes it. He participates, however willingly or not, in an experimental program that ends up sending his consciousness into the future, and it's in there where he finds success, and transmits that success to the past, to his own past. How do you make sense of life? You trust it. I guess that's what you might say this film's message is.

Anyway, see Source Code. You'll thank me later.