Cinematic Concerns

Or, two science fiction thrillers that play with experiential perception (putting the audience in the shoes, nay, minds of the protagonists and making them feel what they feel) and starring two of the hottest young male stars in Hollywood today. They're also both really awesome sci-fi thrillers, which is rare these days. Let's start.



Readers who've encountered previous posts on this blog would know it, but for the record I'm coming into this film having read the screenplay. Which means I know how the story goes and how it ends (well, it was a few years ago so thankfully I don't remember everything), so my input is more in terms of how every cast and crew member after the writer interpreted the film onto the screen.

The short of it was that director Duncan Jones kept most of the script intact, and did the story justice. There were certain things that clearly came from him rather than from the script, certain scenes that enhanced that moment of the story.

Upon hearing the premise, some people I know instinctively referred to Vantage Point as a comparison. Which immediately sounded false to me. I felt Vantage Point was a good idea but it was also severely repetitive, despite the fact that we learn new information at every new chapter that shows the events from a different character's POV. Source Code, however, marries that replaying with the central character's dilemma and frustrations. Capt. Colter Stevens has to solve a massacre mystery by being inserted into the source code multiple times, and each time he has a limited 8 minutes to discover new information, but unlike Groundhog Day (which probably a lot of Malaysians didn't see so that reference didn't pop up so much around me here) he doesn't have a thousand years to find the answer. He has just hours, if that.

Also, Vantage Point didn't give us anyone to focus our attention or goodwill, which is an unfortunate but inevitable nature of that story, whereas Source Code offers us such classy actors as Jake Gyllenhaal and Michelle Monaghan (as soon as I heard those casting choices and that the director of Moon is on it, I knew that Ben Ripley's script was in good hands) and Jeffrey Wright and Vera Farmiga (who's been getting the bulk of the praise for this film from film critics). Does Gyllenhaal and Monaghan have chemistry? Yes they do, and it's important for this story that they do. Equally important is the emotional connection between Gyllenhaal and Farmiga.

This is the kind of story I myself love to write, not just the almost-realistic sci-fi stuff and placing characters in such situations and seeing how that plays out, but also the way in which the story delivers information to the audience: slowly, bit by bit, not all at once. Throw the audience headlong into an unfamiliar situation without any explanation, thus confusing them, but slowly let them catch on to facts and info, and they learn as the protagonist(s) learn.

You may wonder about the science behind it, whether it's plausible. After all, it was pretty flippant about explaining the workings of the source code, with just a couple of throwaway sciencey sounding terms like 'parabolic calculus' and quantum mechanics. Well, probably not, but compared to most such movies it's rather more sophisticated with its scientific base: it makes use of the idea of multiverses (so that an audience thinking in terms of time travel is as outdated as a student espousing creationism in a class about the theory of evolution).

At 93 minutes, Source Code's pacing is just nice: tautly edited but with breathing space in between, and not annoying when it cuts back to the beginning of Colter's entry into the source code which necessarily begins in the same place every time (because it knows when to dispense with showing the whole thing again and just cuts to quick montages).

The denouement is a nice touch and, if I remember correctly, wasn't in the draft of the screenplay I read. It is also, again, a gentle reminder of the effectiveness of setups and payoffs.




The movie begins with a newly-designed film technique that we'll call infinite zoom. Okay, the camera can do one of two things: it can zoom, or it can dolly in ... or it can do both at the same time, but each of those camera movements have different effects. Now, you can have your camera on a track and keep pushing in, and that'll be a kind of long-tracking shot ... possibly a boring one. What they did here is to have the camera zoom in, and keep zooming, and keep zooming, for hundreds of yards ...

Which is impossible. Read here on how they use visual effects to make this technique work. It's a pretty nifty trick, and it's an effect that does something to your visual perception, feeling like it's too much to take in, which ties in to the title. (It'd be nicer if the opening credits weren't so huge ... in fact, it'd be nicer if they weren't there at all.)

The movie posits a drug that can increase human brain power orders of magnitude higher than most people. Such a premise is what we would call a high concept, and it's one that can very easily be wasted if it lands on the hands of an apathetic Hollywood screenwriter. I mean, you write in a smart character, and that character must do or say things that are mindblowing, right? Well, yes and no. A smart person isn't all wise, and sometimes misses things; but quite often what Hollywood offers is a so-called smart protagonist who is suddenly all stupid and making bad choices during most of Act II that his smart brain would have sounded warning bells to if he really is that smart (just so that he can learn a lesson about humility, or how he needs to pay more attention to loved ones, etc).

Not so here. I'm genuinely impressed with the writing, with what the plot puts the characters through, and how the plot plays out, and the fact that the central character, Eddie, is consistently believable when he is in the zone as a guy whose brain is firing on all cylinders. Nothing here seems implausible, and the most farfetched idea you have to accept is that a pill can do that to a person – not much of a suspension of disbelief.

But of course, the major theme in this movie is the side effects brought about by the drug – and not just physiological effects. As with most drugs, at first the side effects are not apparent. And then they hit, and then you see what that does to the character. And that is simply an illustration of the equilibrium-tending nature of reality. (On the other hand, there's entropy ...) As King Philip says in the movie Alexander, "No man or woman can be too powerful or too beautiful without disaster befalling." And the consequences on Eddie's life and the lives of those around him are so well-written that in some cases they're essentially plot twists; in other words, the film wasn't predictable and kept my attention throughout the film.

I'll say it: the Academy continues to stubbornly neglect science fiction films, but if it didn't, this one deserves a spot among the Oscar nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay.

I would also praise the performances. Bradley Cooper has come a long way since he played the scumbag in Wedding Crashers (arguably, his star status is currently shining brighter than Vaughn or Wilson at this moment), and puts in a spot-on performance of a down on his luck writer given a new lease of life that takes him into the fast lane, and zooming through it. The support players Abbie Cornish, Robert De Niro, and Anna Friel (lovely Anna Friel) sunk into their roles so well that I didn't notice them. A couple of times some of these characters face a life and death situation, which in most movies would be par-for-the-course since we're so used to them in the world of movies now, but thanks to the actors' performances in particular it felt pretty suspenseful to a moviegoer who rarely experiences suspense in the theatres. In particular, Friel's role, though small, left an impression on me.

There are lots of stylish camera and editing techniques lavished on the film, which seems to be trying very hard to get the audience to experience what Eddie is experiencing, but without being too gimmicky to the point of jolting them off the trajectory of the story. (Applied to another film they probably are gimmicky.) Come to think of it, the film deserves an Oscar nomination for Editing as well.

A well-paced, well-made film. It'll be interesting to see whether I like it as much at the end of the year.