I'm about to make a controversial statement

I liked it a lot. I can't remember the last time I saw a movie in the theater with little to no knowledge beforehand and was pleasantly surprised and didn't feel like I had wasted my money.

It has a magic bean that is clever and has interesting, well designed rules and, for the most part, everybody gives a wonderful performance (Jeffrey Wright not so much).

A+++ would watch again.

Nnnnnnnnnope.

Terrible ending, but the rest of the film was brilliant.

That was the part I liked best. There's a lot of very deep sci-fi buried in that ending, none of which was spoon-fed to the audience. I loved that.

Maybe I'm giving it too much credit, but it's kind of like Primer in a way. You can watch it for what it is, and that's fine, but if you have a thorough education in the philosophical interpretations of quantum physics, there are whole layers there that aren't at all evident otherwise. The tension in the last act is about whether, in the world of the story, the Bohr/Planck "Copenhagen school" interpretation is true, or whether Hugh Everett's idea is. During that one shot (you know the one I mean if you've seen it) I was on the edge of my seat, almost unbearably anxious to find out whether the story takes place in a unitary or a non-unitary universe.

Of course, it's entirely possible the writer, Ben Ripley, wouldn't know a wavefunction if one came up and introduced itself, and the whole nerdtastic intellectual layer of the movie is just purely accidental. But it works so well I have a hard time believing it was just a lucky guess.

Last edited by Jeffery Harrell (2011-07-24 16:27:39)

The ending totally ruins the film for me. If they had faded to black on "that shot", the movie would have been beautiful, poignant, and satisfyingly dark. However, the last five minutes give us a cliched, forced conclusion, complete with some baffling sci-fi and cheesy sentiment. When I show it to people, I will shut it off before that scene.

***SPOILER ALERT***

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No, I agree with you there. Tons of happy endings work without cheese. But in the context of everything that came before it, this ending didn't for me. And this one was definitely forced. When your ending requires you to invent some completely new sci-fi bullshit to justify it being optimistic, don't do that ending. The movie was totally uncomfortable with allowing its main character to die a happy death, even when the audience wasn't. I may be a cynic, but I thought the movie was cynical as well. In that way, the ending was a total cop-out.

EDIT: And even if I did buy that absurd "alternate universes" crap, the ending raises dozens of questions that it refuses to answer in favor of watching our hero walk happily into the sunset (in someone else's body, by the way. I guess there's no room for that poor guy in this brave new world!)

Last edited by Doctor Submarine (2011-07-25 02:58:39)

Jeff's article about Primer blew my mind, it made me realize how dumb I am.

Yeah, go for it. I liked it alot. These sorts of character and concept-driven movies seem to be rare these days.

Solely because of this thread, I rented Source Code last night.  Thought it was great.     The ending made perfect sense to me, and should have to anyone who understood Back to the Future II, since it's the same premise.   

Not a transcendant OMG best movie EVAR, but entertaining and well made in all respects.  And as Teague said, love it or hate it, there should be more movies like that.

Spoiler - The one issue that I would quibble about is the "erasure" of the poor fella whose body gets inhabited.   The movie sorta ignores this, and not surprisingly.     But the inhabit-ee was dead when the story began, and in no scenario could he have survived without everyone else dying too.  Unfortunate, yes, but that's just the way the equation played out.  So the incident did have one casualty after all. 

Yes, I would have preferred the movie give some acknowledgement of that unavoidable fact, but I can understand why they chose to just downplay it.