5. Source Code (2011)
When Duncan Jones Moon came out, most noticed that the man had the potential of becoming a science fiction guru. The man had done his homework, and you could find allusions to Alien, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Solaris, and countless other pivotal works that define the science fiction of today. It shocked cinephiles when we realized that he also possessed the ability of genre-transmutation by the release of only his second film. The science fiction remained present as expected, but managing to tweak it into a Hitchcockian thriller was a feat with which Hitchcock himself may have struggled. In fact, he frowned upon it, as he claimed after his release of The Birds. He believed that explaining why the birds initiated a revolutionary war would morph his area of comfort into something more scientific rather than suspenseful. Jones, however, succeeded in an area that the great director feared. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Colter Stevens, a man who wakes up in a running train on route to Chicago. His last memory is being in action in Afghanistan, but he somehow had a chunk of his life erased, as he has no recollection of returning home. More intricately, he has no idea why or how he ended up in that train. Things grow eerier when he meets Christina, who is apparently his traveling companion, and she refers to him as Sean. The Hitchcockian case of mixed up identity like in North and Northwest and The Wrong Man is revealed to the viewer right off the bat, a bat that Jones raises much more and enough to strike out any baseball player. Confused, Stevens rushes to the bathroom and notices that Christina is right. Whoever he is, it is definitely not Colter Stevens any longer; his reflection is one of a different man. Science fiction crawls into the picture here, and watchers demand an explanation now in order to take the films concept seriously. Stevens is nothing but a mere surrogate subjected to reliving an alternate reality that occurred, in real time, only hours earlier. Stevens mission is to pinpoint the identity of the man responsible of the recently executed terrorist attack on that very same train from the perspective of one of the witnesses. His problem is that he only has a limited amount of time before he has to restart the mission, since the train explodes each and every time without exception. The time-ticking therefore enhances the suspense. Gyllenhaal, however, relives several attempts to find the culprit within the train, but a scene that stands out the most is when he follows and interrogates his first suspect at a train station. Undertones of Bernard Hermanns iconic violins, cellos, and other Psycho-esque musical screeches blend in with the Stevens paranoid interrogative skills. You can breathe in the Cary Grant from North by Northwest through Gyllenhalls acting, since he delivers an accurate depiction of a man taking part of an assignment without any kind of time to stop and ask: how on earth did I get mixed up into this?