My first ever complete movie review, intended for our University magazine. Edited (and apologetic) for language. Posted a month later because of New Zealand’s lousy delayed release dates.

In Duncan Jones’ Source Code, a sci-fi thriller about a guy trying to save a train from blowing up, reality doesn’t matter. But it’s clearly worth changing.

This 93-minute flick puts us in the shoes of Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal), an ex-helicopter pilot for the U.S. army, whom we learn is actually himself in the shoes of someone else: Sean Fentress, a school teacher who died in the very train Stevens is trying to save. With eight minutes to find the bomb-planter, he repeatedly gets put in the train by a technology called the “Source Code”, while also being tasked to avoid falling in love with the femme fatale he’s seated opposite (good luck with that!). Jones’ promise to us seems to be an intricate, fast-paced who-doin’-it with explosions and mind-boggling revelations. And he delivers.

The smartest thing about Source Code is that it takes nearly every sci-fi concept in the book and blends them together in one nerdtastic, scigasmic orgy. Multi-reality-time-travel: check. Guy-in-simulated-body: check. World-altering-government-technology-built-by-mad-scientist: check. Reality-confusion: check. When first thinking about how I would describe Source Code in terms of other movies, “it’s like Inception meets Avatar,” I thought. That later changed to “Back to the Future meets 12 Monkeys,” until I finally settled on “Groundhog Day meets Deja Vu.” (Yes, I do love my sci-fi thrillers.) The truth is, it’s one giant cocktail of all those movies, while it itself is, thankfully, none of those.

As serious and bleak as that might sound, though, Jones clearly has sight of our funny bone. For one, you have Indian-Canadian comedian Russell Peters, worshipped by Asian circles world-over for his race jokes and accent-humour, playing a comedian passenger in the train. He’s comic relief who we know is going to die every 8 minutes, but it’s Russell-****ing-Peters. If you’re aware of his humour, you quietly chuckle to yourself each time he appears on screen, while another part of your brain mulls over the complex reality in which a bomb is about to go off in a few seconds. And then you have a mad scientist (played by Jeffrey Wright) over-punctuating nerdtalk like a long-lost high school buddy of Dr. Brown from Back to the Future. Seemingly intentional touches by the director, both can get distracting at times, but that is outweighed by the sheer amount of drollery they add to this otherwise highbrow flick.

Source Code is a solid sci-fi entertainer for most film-goers, while also being the kind which could keep many awake at night. I’m just finally glad to see a sci-fi blockbuster without confusing pseudo-intellectualisation and tall blue non-humans.