Scott Ellington's Blog

Just another weblog

Source Code

This is an excellent film that’s designed to engage the viewer in the complete disorientation of the protagonist.  It presents the audience with a completely disorienting sequence of detailed events for a nominal 8 minutes, while the hero (and the viewer) struggle to make sense of what the hell is  happening.  Then the 8 minute interval ends in a wildly-disorienting round of orders, desperate requests for grounding information, and disorienting explanations that circumvent and sidestep the protagonist’s getting a fucking grip, and the original 8 minute sequence recommences.  And it goes on like that, with the hero (and viewer) ferreting sense out of the welter of circular and linear junk that transpires in the gradual revelation of an enormously-important mission in which the life or death of the central characters is secondary.

In spite of, or because of, the massive barrage of confusion, this film is wonderfully riveting as it progresses; not unlike a movie company shooting and re-performing and reshoting an 8 minute set piece, with choices and discoveries and improvizations and errors and consultations and no fourth wall.  And it moves like an anvil dropped from a speeding helicopter; but it’s less predictable.

Frost, Denoff, and Rutledge lust after the same pathetic objective, internet celebrity; quantum geocentric catholicism: Galileo’s Epistle to the Corinthians (And one member suffer any thing, all the members suffer with it…) or They get paid, We get paid because We’re all in this together.  Yahoos, heelots, and most billionaires are on the same incorrect and unheroic page in the universal playbook; Number One.

Spectacular speculative fiction created expressly for film.

19 Jul 12 Posted by | Uncategorized | | Leave a comment