Source code

With a track record comprising two Species video features and one scifi TV movie, Ben Ripley needed to show Hollywood that he could also write a classy screenplay. Most important, he needed producers who'd back it. They were Vendome (whose only other product so far is Larry Crowne, suggesting it's probably a Tom Hanks venture) and Mark Gordon (best known for Criminal Minds and other TV series). They bought Ripley's concept of a scifi disaster-thriller, Source Code, in which a near-dead pilot's brain is returned to an exploded train's dead passenger's body, in repeated eight-minute sessions, on a mission to discover the bomber who's planning to annihilate Chicago.

Keeping the budget low, the production hired one minor star name for the lead role (Swedish-Ashkenazi Jake Gyllenhaal, recently panned for the Prince of Persia Disney/Bruckheimer epic bore), and a sophomore Brit director (son-of-David Bowie David Jones, freshly successful with Moon). Ex-model Michelle Monaghan (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Eagle Eye) smiles well as the sudden love interest aboard the train, while Ukrainian-American Vera (Up in the Air) Farmiga and Jeffrey (Angels in America) Wright fret attractively as the pilot's military mind controllers. Location filming in Montreal also kept the costs down, and everyone concerned boosted their reputations (including the rousing old-fashioned title-music composer and slick technical teams).

Director Jones, needing to work at a much faster pace than for Moon, and in a world of railway sounds and effects, sped the plot along appropriately, adding just a few presumably deliberate WTF moments in the far-fetched tale of "time reassignment". One scene in a washroom with the pilot and one of his chief suspects is repeated, out of sequence and then three times, in a possible tribute to Christopher Nolan's maddening Memory. If so, it was irritatingly pointless.

After the movie, the biggest non-sequitors remain unexplained. The pilot does re-write history, which the storyline said he wouldn't be able to, and he's apparently stolen a previously-living man's mind, body and girlfriend, which he shouldn't have. But he does so in order to die at peace with himself and his estranged father, so that's all right folks, schmaltzy Hollywood-style.