The geek who fell to Earth – The Movie Filter

From the hippy moon landing response of “Space Oddity,” to his glittered rising Phoenix persona, Ziggy Stardust, to the uneasily ethereal The Man Who Fell to Earth, David Bowie is a pop culture chameleon constantly reinventing himself as an artist. Bowie has always discovered ideas outside of left field and injected them into the musical mainstream. Now his son is attempting the same feat at the movies, roping quantum theory and an indie edge into modern studio thrillers.

Duncan Zowie Jones, a former philosophy graduate student at Vanderbilt, has shifted through his own transformations, going by Zowie Bowie as a child, then Joey, then Joe and now Duncan. He graduated from London Film School and wowed critics in 2009 with his low budget, visually evocative Kubrick fest, Moon. Jones returns this month with Source Code, a clever anthology of science fiction ideas and archetypes spooled through an action movie machine and set on a soon-to-explode El Train rolling above the streets of Chicago. With the term “code” so prominently placed in a thriller, surely geeks have inherited the Earth.

It is déjŕ vu all over again for Jake Gyllenhaal, who first made a splash 10 years ago as the troubled and titular ne’er-do-well in the time-warping cult favorite Donnie Darko. Now, he plays a soldier who wakes up on a train trapped in the body of another man. Gyllenhaal relives the same eight minutes—the last eight minutes of the man’s life before the train goes boom—again and again while collecting clues to stop the terrorist’s next and even deadlier bomber’s plot.

Like Sam Rockwell’s lonely astronaut in Moon, Gyllenhaal must not only discover why he is in this unenviable position, but also decide if his destiny is to be defined by the ill-fitting caste of duty or else by some heroic exertion of free will.

This is “Sci-fi (The Duncan Jones remix),” and the perspective implication is that events, and even facts, must be revisited time and time again in order to decipher their full meaning, lest we suffer the consequences. It’s a post-modernist theory from the son of a post-modern icon. As Source Code’s mystery deepens, the other implication may be that external forces are working to do whatever they can to prevent that level of analysis from taking place.

While on the train for the upteenth time, our seconds-splitting sleuth falls for a doomed woman, and against orders, amends his mission to include saving her life, too. With Source Code, Jones gives us a fresh and entertaining angle on the ultimate fantasy: going back in time to change a mistake or to stop something bad from happening to someone we love.

As Elvis Presley sang in “Mystery Tune” from his early Sun Records days, “Well that long black train got my baby and gone….Well it took my baby, but it never will again….No, not again.”

I just hope when the lights go up and the credits roll that I don’t feel like asking for the last eight minutes of my life back.

Source Code is in theaters April 1.