Having instantly marked himself out as a filmmaker to keep an eye on after blowing everyone away with his debut feature Moon, Duncan Jones was under pressure to deliver with his sophomore effort from behind the camera. Sticking to what he knew best, Source Code took him back into the realm of high concept sci-fi, and we’d be selling things short to say it worked a treat.
The fast-paced and frantic time loop tale netted almost $150 million at the box office on a budget just shy of $32 million, landed a Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes score of 92 percent, gained an 82 percent user rating on the aggregation site from over 100,000 votes, and continues to capture the imagination on streaming a decade after its initial release.
Per FlixPatrol, Source Code has been reliving its final moments over and over again on the iTunes global rankings, with the brisk 93-minute barnburner delivering edge-of-your-seat thrills from first to last. Jake Gyllenhaal’s Colter Stevens takes repeated trips into the past in an effort to relive the final minutes of a train bombing victim in an effort to glean new information, uncover the culprit’s identity, and theoretically stop it from ever happening again.
Needless to say, complications arise as Stevens becomes convinced he can thwart the initial attack based on his actions, but only if he acts quick enough. Like the vast majority of time travel stories, Source Code‘s logic and lore isn’t infallible, but it doesn’t really matter when the end product is so entertaining.