This post was to be a review of the movie Source Code, currently in theatres, perhaps you have seen the ads on TV or read about it. Source Code is a science fiction popcorn movie, heavy on concept, but starring Jake Gyllenhal, an actor know for more "serious" work so I was intrigued.
But a funny happened on my way to the movie review.
Well, it was more like a movie happened on my way to the movie review. That movie was The Escapist, a decidely non science fiction British film starring Brian Cox and available on DVD.
On the surface, these are two very different movies. As stated, Source Code is a popcorn movie and a pretty good one, a high concept science fiction movie in the guise of an action thriller. There are many explosions (or one explosion repeated over and over) fist fights, chases etc. There is terrorist to catch, time running out and thousands of lives on the line.
The Escapist is a jail break movie. A very good jail break movie. It is a film filled with tension and action but it is not an action movie. It is a movie about desperate men doing desperate things, it is a movie about redemption hand difficult to achieve that that may be.
What these two disparate movies have in common are structure and pacing.
Source Code is very much about structure, to the point that it plays a huge role in the plot. It is a movie who's premise is that when a person dies, they maintain 8 minutes of awareness even after death; a super secret military project has learned how to exploit that 8 minutes, by inserting the hero (who's name is Colter Stevens, which couldn't be more "comic book") into a dead person's source code so he can catch a terrorist who has planted a bomb on a commuter train. The train has already blown up, but they need to find the bad guy before he plants another bomb, a dirty bomb. Colter has that 8 minutes to do the job but here's the catch: If superhero Colter doesn't find the bomb before it explodes again, no worries .. they will just restart the source code and he goes back to the beginning of the 8 minutes to try again. Thusly he relives that time frame over and over again, he can fail, because he will never actually die.
It's like the movie Groundhog Day ... but with explosions.
The story of Source Code is inherantly non linear. The story of The Escapist is quite linear. Man is in prison for a long time. He has a daughter on the outside who he has not seen since she was a little girl. Now she is an adult and a junkie and her health is in peril. Man decides he needs to escape to rescue his little girl. Man recruits fellow prisoners and hatches a plot.
But this story is told in anything but a linear fashion. There is ample use of flashbacks, or perhaps flash forwards, oblique cuts etc. We are experiencing the escape at the same time we are experiencing the events leading up to it
It's all about structure. Director Rupert Wyatt uses story structure to tell the story as much as he uses script. Source Code's story is all about temporal structure; our characters live their life in an 8 minute loop while they also live a life outside that loop .. or do they. We are told that the source code creates an alternate reality and in Phillip K Dick fashion we begin to question which reality is which. Source Code does this in a sci fi premise but The Escapist uses editing to create a sense of variable realities. There is no dubious science behind it, we are just given the opportunity to question what we are seeing.
This is even more Phillip K Dick
In the end, it comes down to two films, in albeit very different ways, that want us to question the reality of what we are seeing. Source Code is no Inception, it is clearly more intended to be popcorn fare but good acting and tight editing help us leap over some of the obvious plot faults to be able to appreciate the original premise
The Escapist is something different. There are things here to think about; men in custody create alternate realities as a way of staying sane and it redemption possible for someone, just because they really really want it ..
There have been quite a few movies recently that challenge our concept reality. Of course, the viewing of a film in itself is an exercise in an alternate reality. There is no bomb on the train, there is no train, there are no men wandering the sewers of London trying to escaped their own personal Hell.
Yet, if it's all done properly, for a couple of hours, we think that indeed there is.
No comments:
Post a Comment