Duncan Jones' Source Code – what's it all about?

Sizzle! Aargh! That, dear reader, is the sound of IndieMovies coming into contact with the script for Source Code, a screenplay so hot right now that it could sear a hole in the hull of a battleship, or be used to very quickly bake something nice. Some cookies cut into little sheep shapes perhaps. Awww.

A couple of weeks ago it was reported that Source Code would be the second feature film for Moon director Duncan Jones, while Jake Gyllenhaal was in talks to take on the lead role (incidentally, I hear Jake Gyllenhaal is arranging a fund-raising event but won't tell anyone what charity he is collecting for. Yes, that's right: his appeal is a complete mystery). Interest in the script which so successfully elicited the signature of Jones has consequently burgeoned, with Source Code currently rated second in ScriptShadow's own list of their top 25 screenplays, as well as being number one amongst their readership. The draft hosted by ScriptShadow is an early one, by Species sequels screenwriter Ben Ripley; it has since received a fresh lick of paint from Billy Ray (whose credits range from Bruce Willis erotic thriller Color of Night to this year's lauded State of Play). However, reading the Ripley draft, it is still eminently possible to a) discern the commercial appeal that prompted producers Philippe Rousselet and Mark Gordon to pick up Source Code, and b) detect the thematic considerations which you suspect might have been pivotal in hooking in the involvement of Jones.

WARNING – TITANICALLY HUGE PLOT SPOILERS AHOY!

Ripley's script is, at its core, an against-the-clock thriller. However, the framing toys with the conventions of that genre, with the action being confined to two primary locations. This is because Source Code also features science fiction elements that allow the plot to shift through time, rather than needing to ratchet around in any geographical sense.

The story begins on a morning commuter train zipping through the New Jersey countryside, its ultimate destination New York's Penn Station. Aboard this train is Colter, a man in his thirties, with no idea how he got there. The identification on his person seems to identify him as Sean Fentress, but he believes himself to be a military helicopter pilot who should be on operations in Iraq. As he muddles his way round the train he encounters a number of his fellow travellers, including a young woman named Christina, and he learns that he has supposedly been taking the same train every morning for the last three months. From this point the narrative hooks arrive in rapid succession: first, the baffled Colter retreats to the train bathroom and is understandably freaked out to find the face of Sean Fentress staring back at him from the mirror; second, he finds a colossal bomb secreted in an air-conditioning duct in the same bathroom; and third, the discovered bomb immediately goes off, blowing Colter, Christina, and everyone else on the train to teeny tiny smithereens.

Ten minutes in and it looks like we're all done. But, of course, we are not. There is still plenty of ground to cover. Colter reawakens in a kind of astronaut's capsule, an isolation unit apparently situated in some secret military facility. Via a video link he communicates with a stern soldier named Goodwin, who quizzes him about who bombed the train; he also catches glimpse of a mysterious pipe-smoking individual. Having established that Colter does not know the identity of the terrorist, Goodwin promptly informs him he has another seventeen minutes to find out who it is. Before he can object, Colter finds himself back on the train, at precisely the same instant as when he appeared in a state of such bewilderment at the outset of the script.

And that is pretty much the model for the ensuing action, with Colter being flung back and forth in time and space, between the ill-fated train and his sci-fi capsule. It is eventually established that the train was destroyed earlier that very morning, in the precise circumstances witnessed by Colter. Further terrorist attacks have been promised for that day, but the authorities have no clue as to where, or in what form they will come. Consequently the Source Code project – of which Goodwin, and the pipe-smoker, Rutledge, are a part – has been activated. As we’ve learned, this involves Captain Colter Stevens being flung back into a kind of hyperreal simulation of the past, to occupy the body of one of the victims (a Mr S Fentress), to try and identify which one of the commuters is the bomber.

Ripley's script contains echoes of Denzel Washington-starrer Déjà Vu, Groundhog Day, and TV's Quantum Leap (an inescapable reference in the early scene where Colter is startled to see the face of Fentress in the bathroom mirror). The terrorism thread of the story develops steadily throughout, with Colter first hot on the trail of Guzman, a train passenger of Middle-Eastern origin, before ditching this obvious red herring and delving deeper into the mystery. Via various twists and turns it is revealed that, rather than plant the bomb themselves, an Islamist terror group have paid an American citizen $80m to blow up the train, thus facilitating further attacks on citizens fleeing Manhattan via the road bridges (the railways will be shut, y'see). The well-remunerated stooge turns out to be Derek, a commodities trader, his involvement thereby neatly bracketing together the twin bogeymen of twenty-first century America – Islamic extremists and unscrupulous money men.

The other villain of the piece turns out to be the initially amiable scientist Rutledge, and it is here that one begins to see why Duncan Jones and Source Code might have been viewed as such suitable prospective mates. Much akin to Sam Bell in Moon, Colter discovers he is not who he thought: helicopter pilot Captain Colter Stevens physically expired in Iraq some months previously. Only his brain remains active, since it was specially primed to interact with the time-hopping source code (of which the science is kept very woolly; Rutledge at one point simply declaring “it would take weeks to explain.” Handy, that). The effectively-deceased Colter has to deal with the fact that his corporeal existence is over, and he forces the manipulative Rutledge to agree to shut his consciousness down for good if he identifies the bomber for him. In contrast to the duplicitous Rutledge, Goodwin eventually reveals a hidden nobility. It is he – once Derek has been identified as the bomber – who eventually releases the mangled remains of Colter's body from the source code mechanisms.

Goodwin also permits Colter to make one last 'jump' into the body of Fentress on the train, to again relive the seventeen minutes running up to the explosion. Once there, Colter quietly enacts his heroic fantasy, arranging for Derek to be arrested and for the train to be saved. He believes this reality will come to an abrupt halt and he will be cast into oblivion once his seventeen minutes are up, but to his amazement neither of these things happen, and as he walks off with Christina at the denouement, the inference must surely be that he is going to continue living his life as normal. Er, except presumably it is not his life, it belongs to Sean Fentress. He already has relatives, a job, and who knows what emotional commitments to people he would not recognise if they wandered up and slapped him round the chops. And what reality do he and Christina exist in now anyway? Is it completely synthetic? A parallel dimension? Colter's own conception of the afterlife? It certainly leaves plenty of scope for a wacky sequel as Colter tries to come to terms with life as someone else in a world situated who knows where in the space/time continuum, but that is a tale unlikely to be deemed as commercially exciting by producers Gordon and Rousselet.

And lastly, what about casting? Well, obviously Gyllenhaal and his superfluous extra vowel have been lined up as Colter Stevens. For the other principals, I thought that Goodwin – the gruff, no-nonsense major with a noble heart beating under his icy exterior – might be a good fit for Chris Cooper. As Rutledge, the manipulative and monstrously ambitious pipe-chugging boffin, I pictured Sir Anthony Hopkins. Appropriately enough, Ripley's script describes Rutledge's eyes as being a 'piercing blue', and the Welsh knight certainly isn't adverse to a bit of genre scenery-chewing, as his upcoming appearances in Thor and The Wolfman indicate. For the part of Christina, the aspiring artist toiling away in a job she hates and the commuter who interacts with Colter to by far the greatest degree, I pictured Elizabeth Banks. Seeing as the Christina character's main job is to react to the alternately confused and outlandish pronouncements of a man who appears to be crazy, it seems an appropriate role for the woman who played Laura Bush in Oliver Stone's W.. And as Derek, the commodities trader who sells his country out for $80million, it could only be Jeremy Piven, on his most snivelly form.