Director Duncan Jones Shows off "Source Code"

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Parent Category: Film and the Arts

Category: Reviews

Published on Monday, 28 March 2011 08:55

Written by Shade Rupe

Hard science-fiction film fans have long suffered the drought of complex stories with ones that offered feats of derring-do accented by laser beams, costume aliens, and digital space backdrops. The occasional quailty film, say Children of Men, will come down the pike, though the experience is rare.

A few years ago, a curious low-budget film with few characters arrived, completely with unusual poster design. Something was different here. Someone wanted to say something and we wanted to hear about it. That film was Moon and its director was Duncan Jones.

Returning with his second feature, the complex time-twisting drama Source Code, director Jones reengages solitude and longing in this Earthian tale of a man living his life along a stream of computer code. Or something close to that.

Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhall) wakes up to find himself in a crushed capsule of sorts with flat television monitors and a woman solder’s face (Vera Farmiga) telling him he only has a few minutes and he’s got to stop a bomb on board a train. A bomb on a train?

Poor Colter still has to figure out what happened to him and why he’s here. Before he can get far, he’s on the train in question, sitting across from a woman who says she’s taken his advice, and all he knows for sure is he’s got to find that bomb to find out who he is.

Shot, designed, and edited as a feature-length scenario in suspense, Source Code moves us forward, and we root him on, sharing in Colter's breakneck pace to solve the problem. Then he, and us are rewound, even tighter, as we share in Colter’s goals -- find out who he is, what happened to him, and how he’s going to save Chicago and most of all the people on the train, who have already experienced a previously occurred doom.

Source Code deserves to share its surprises with the adventurous filmgoers enticed by such mysteries, and Astoria’s Museum of the Moving Image created such an opportunity.

On Friday, March 25, 2011, in their amazing futuristic theater, its own time tunnel design forcing the audience into a moving time machine much like the train barreling and re-barreling ahead in the film.

After the film stunned its audience, director Jones took the stage and pleasantly discussed his love for science-fiction films, attempted some explanation of the film’s physics, and mentioned the difficulties of bringing his another film project Mute to cinema life -- something he's been trying to do for years. Finding a star who was willing to be silent through an entire feature was one of them. This dynamic man shared his sparkling sense of humor and afterwards greeted his new fans, and ones returning from their experience with Moon.

Paired with his photographer companion Rodene Ronquillo, the couple entertained the final spectators of a grand new science-fiction filmmaking talent, one who relies on story over style, characters over crashes of planes.

Whatever his next project may be, Duncan Jones will most definitely be taking us somewhere we haven’t been before.

Museum of the Moving Image
35 Avenue at 36 Street
Astoria, Queens, New York, USA
http://www.movingimage.us/

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