WMS

Source Code

2011 · Directed by Duncan Jones

🧘4

Woke Score

74

Critic

🍿76

Audience

Ultra Based

Critics rated this 70 points above its woke score. Among Ultra Based films, this critic score ranks #500 of 1469.

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Synopsis

When decorated soldier Captain Colter Stevens wakes up in the body of an unknown man, he discovers he's part of a mission to find the bomber of a Chicago commuter train.

Consciousness Assessment

Source Code is a cerebral science fiction thriller that occupies itself entirely with questions of consciousness, temporal mechanics, and personal identity. Director Duncan Jones constructs an intellectually engaging narrative around a soldier trapped in an eight-minute loop, forced to relive a train bombing repeatedly in pursuit of the perpetrator. The film's philosophical preoccupations are genuinely interesting, if somewhat dated in their treatment of what constitutes the self. These concerns have nothing to do with contemporary cultural awareness. The cast performs competently across a straightforward narrative that treats its ensemble as characters in a genre scenario, not as vessels for social commentary. There is no attempt to interrogate the military context through any lens of institutional critique, nor does the film's romance subplot engage with anything beyond conventional romantic tension. The story resolves itself through individual heroism and romantic sacrifice, which is precisely what we would expect from a 2011 mainstream thriller. Source Code is a film made before the cultural moment being measured here, and it remains comfortably indifferent to it.

Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm

Critic Reviews

74%from 41 reviews
San Francisco Chronicle100

Director Duncan Jones achieves a strange and winning amalgam, a gripping action film that also works as poetry.

Mick LaSalleRead Full Review →
IndieWire91

Showcases Jones' ability to provide ample entertainment value with sharply drawn characters in a minimalist setting.

Portland Oregonian91

This is hair-raising, clever and winning entertainment. Even if his protagonists aren't entirely what they seem to be or think they are, Mr. Jones is, it's increasingly clear, the real thing.

Shawn LevyRead Full Review →
Movieline40

Somewhere under all that bloat is the greatest short subject of all time.

Elvis MitchellRead Full Review →