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GeekGuys

macrumors regular
Original poster
Mar 13, 2009
146
5
My first time posting on this forum so be kind :)

I just wondered what everyone thought about the movie Source Code?

I was really enjoying it for the first half but then it started to expose such massive gaps in the plot... It really spoiled the movie.
The end was just dreadful!

My main grip is that the Cpt is linked by the brain to the dead teacher. He can revisit the last 8 minutes of the teachers memories.
How can he see things that the teacher never saw? Like the bomb, the van in the carpark, the gun in the conductors room.... The list goes on....

And don't get me started about the ending!!!

So, anyone care to explain the film to me?
 
I saw it ... it was okay. Not really a movie I would watch again.
The movie ending was kinda weird for me too. Just google it. I know it had something to do with a parallel universe/quantum physics ... something weird like that.
 
i really liked the first 80% of the movie, then the ending went down hill.....

it's a movie, it provided 2 hours of entertainment, it is what it is.
 
Yeah, I didn't enjoy the ending at all.

I'm also a bit lost as to how they got the brains of these people (I assume that's how they got the "source" material) when they were blown up. I mean it's a great premise, but I didn't think it worked well for this story.

On a related note I loved Moon to bits.
 
My main grip is that the Cpt is linked by the brain to the dead teacher. He can revisit the last 8 minutes of the teachers memories.
How can he see things that the teacher never saw? Like the bomb, the van in the carpark, the gun in the conductors room.... The list goes on....

And don't get me started about the ending!!!

So, anyone care to explain the film to me?

I thought that at first too, but then when the end came, it started to make slightly more sense - well, maybe. He wasn't just replaying the dead teacher's memories, he was reliving them. Think of it more like Quantum Leap - he jumped back into someone else's body.

Now, it gets complicated, and explores the nature of reality, the space time continuum, and the many worlds interpretation of quantum physics. What is reality? Is there an objective reality, or is it purely subjective? If a tree falls in the forest, and no-one is there to hear, does it make a sound? When he's on the train, is he also in the pod?

Cogito, ergo sum. Was the train real? Was the pod real? What he saw and felt and did was his reality, and who's to say his reality is any less valid than yours? From your perspective, yours is real and his isn't. From his perspective, his is real. They can't both be real, and yet they are.

So how to resolve the paradox? Many worlds. Like Sliders, kind of. In an infinite multiverse, anything that can happen, does happen, must happen. He changed the timeline, which created a new universe (that's happened in Star Trek a few times, not least the new film), where he lived happily ever after.

The only thing I'm not quite sure about is the email at the end, but then maybe that was from or in another universe too.

Science fiction is fun, and quantum stuff makes my head hurt! "anyone who claims to understand quantum theory is either lying or crazy" - Richard Feynman
 
Saw it as well, enjoyed it overall. The ending and trying to piece together the plausibility of it all was stretching it a bit. Would have made more sense if he had simply died at the end.
 
I saw the movie last weekend and remembered the creator guy saying there were 2 things working together in the Source Code - one was electromagnetic imprinting, and the other was 8 seconds of short term memory. If you treat the guy's brain as infinitely sensitive and ignore scalability, the entire world could have been electromagnetically imprinted on the guy's brain.

The science all BS anyway. I'm still wondering how he managed to cram 30 mins of stuff to do in his last 10 minutes.

At least it had Russell Peters in it.
 
I thought the ending was weird. He totally took over that guys life by staying in his body? How is that going to work? How will he do his job, talk to his friends, remember his family? Plus, what happened to the other guy know that JG is living in his body?
 
In my opinion it has a story very similar to Inception. Didn't like either. Story is based on an overdose of scifi, but still it's just a softcore action movie in a regular setting, with filmography like Memento.

Just another Hollywood blockbuster in the row.
 
I thought the ending was weird. He totally took over that guys life by staying in his body? How is that going to work? How will he do his job, talk to his friends, remember his family? Plus, what happened to the other guy know that JG is living in his body?

I enjoyed the movie. I hardly ever try to figure out the "science" and just remind myself that it is science fiction.

I to was thinking about the same thing. Since he traveled back in time and now occupies another persons body/life what happened to the original person. That is so far my only gripe. Also, iirc in the scene at the bombers van the good guy/girl still try to talk to the bomber instead of just shooting. Gripe #2.
 
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