Duncan Jones to decipher THE SOURCE CODE with Jake Gyllenhaal

By Matt Holmes / June 25, 2011

In the first scene, a man named Colter - Gyllenhaal€™s character - wakes up on a train headed through the New Jersey countryside. He has no idea how he got there and nobody he speaks to can offer him any clues, though he is told that, to his surprise, he has taken this train every day for the last three months.

...writes /film's UK reporter Brendon Connelly, describing the opening of a draft he read for The Source Code, a Jake Gyllenhaal led sci-fi movie lined up to be Duncan Jones' follow up to Moon, which will shoot early 2010for Summit Entertainment. That's according to today's Variety.

So far, so Memento. He goes on...

After some interaction with the various characters in his train car, many of whom become more important as the story unfolds (particularly Christina€ but I won€™t say why, and mention her in part to just raise the question of who the female lead might be), Colter heads to the bathroom where, quite surprisingly, he finds a bomb. Unfortunately, just after Colter finds it, a cell-phone detonator is triggered and€ €he€™s killed. In fact, the entire train explodes. There€™s a big ball of fire and, for just eight frames of film, some other cryptic goings on that only make sense later. We€™re now seven or eight minutes in and about to be shocked. €Colter awakens again, this time in an Isolation Unit where he€™s being debriefed by a man named Goodwin, perhaps symbolically so. It seems that Captain Colter Stevens has just been living through a virtual simulation of the incident on the train in order to discover who it was that bombed it. The cellphone maguffin is a smart one because everybody on the train will have one but finding the right one will also identify who the terrorist is. Simple, but sweet.

Sounds half interesting but the next bit worries me greatly...

As the story goes on, there are only two types of scene - those that show Colter€™s next journey into the same few simulated minutes on the train, and those that take place in the rather austere Isolation Unit in which he€™s expected to report his findings and some unexpected twists come into play. Pretty soon there€™s a suggestion that there€™s more to the simulation than meets the eye and Colter may even be able, somehow, change history and prevent the train from exploding. It€™s not unlike a video game in which he€™s stuck on the same level, dying over and over, repeated and repeated with a new approach to playing every time.

Change history... like a video game where you return to a saved checkpoint? Sounds like the makings of a recipe for disaster if you ask me. Tony Scott's Deja Vu straddled this line very closely and only just managed to get away with his nonsense time-changing plot convention, and it was only really because Scott is so deft at directing action, and keeping us entertained on that level that he made us forget that his film made no sense what-so-ever. More recently, I remember having to sit through Vantage Point which tried and badly failed at a similar idea. The audience just wasn't with a movie that repeated the same twenty minutes over and over again, albeit from a different p.o.v each time. But it sounds like the script is a solid one. Connelly likes it, as do the readers of the excellent site Script Shadow who for a while had it listed as the No. 1 unproduced screenplay in Hollywood. Thankfully, they even have a PDF link to Ben Ripley's (Species III & IV) early draft (which I plan to give a whirl tomorrow), which is said to have now gone through a Billy Ray (State of Play) re-write. The big story though is that Jones has got himself a pretty high profile gig, which is more than deserved, and lets hope he can tap out some of that forgotten, under the surface potential that flows through the veins of Gyllenhaal who has been very tepid for too long now.