It's a pretty good film ,then. But - and from here on in spoilers abound - there was one thing about it that left me a little perturbed.
Here's the thing, though. Once you buy into that theory, it immediately follows that every time - every single time - Jake jumps back, he creates a new Chicago in which two million people die. This film has an off-screen body count in the tens of millions. Indeed, in the final minutes, when Googlehell is begging to be allowed one more jump to save the woman he met this morning and is now desperate to save, he's actually saying "Let me risk two million new lives so I can screw that chick from Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang".
Seems somewhat less romantic put that way, doesn't it?
Of course, following this thought to its conclusion leads to all sorts of ethical madness. Like, if you create six billion new lives knowing two million of them are going to die almost immediately, is that necessarily a bad thing? So I'm not saying there's necessarily a massive moral problem with the film. I just thought it was worth mentioning.
[1] And how different would the film have been if Jake had kept leaping into the body of a sweat-drenched mouth-breather Monaghan was desperate to ditch?
4 comments:
I looked at it the other way; you have a very expensive piece of cutting edge tech, that you would never be able to prove actually worked.
Since everytime it does it's like you never needed it in the first place.
Also forget the 'potential' multiple vitims (personally I only read it as creating a new timeline right at the end - and even then I was all prepared to believe it was the afterlife until you got the conifirmation it wasn't)it's the poor guy we gets taken over that is screwed. He doesn't get his body back when disaster is averted, he's just done over!
It was a good film, but if you think about what's happening for too long, none of it makes sense so it's best just to go with it.
And did you spot, well hear, Sam? The makers all too aware of the QL factor thmeseleves
"Since everytime it does it's like you never needed it in the first place."
I don't this is true. I didn't count how often Colter jumped back into the train; let's say 10 for the sake of argument. That means that by the end of the film there are eleven different realities. In the first one, the one from where Colter originally hails (and crucially keeps going back to), there was a train bombing but an averted dirty bomb. In that world, the use of Source Code is very much apparent.
You then have, in universes two through ten, two bombs that go off. It's only in universe eleven where both bombs were stopped and thus SC was never employed.
But in that universe, presumably SC will be employed in the next similar disaster, setting up a new chain of realities, and so on. as The Other Half poiinted out to me as I was writing this, that means there will presumably be a final universe in which SC is closed down (since, from their perspective, it was never used), but that's not quite the same thing.
Of course, what really starts baking your noodle is the realisation that every world Colter created had its own version of SC, and of himself, and presumably they all booted SC up after the train bombing. So did the nine worlds in which Colter didn't stop the bomber actually lose downtown Chicago? Or did their Colter stop it. 90% of the new realities create 10 new realities, and 90% of them create 10 new realities, and so on forever.
"it's the poor guy we gets taken over that is screwed. He doesn't get his body back when disaster is averted, he's just done over!"
I hadn't thought about that, good point. "I'm going to go back to the train and save every single one of them, except the poor schmuck I'm riding". Though, he was destined to die in any case, I guess.
"It was a good film, but if you think about what's happening for too long, none of it makes sense so it's best just to go with it"
It was certainly done well enough for these questions to not surface until after the film (as with, say, Sunshine), but I like disassembling these things and having a poke around afterwards. You never know what you'll find.
"And did you spot, well hear, Sam?"
I didn't, actually; where was that?
Thinking about it I don't think he was creating a new reality each time. After all there is the run where he saves the girl but when he goes back she is still dead.
This would seem to imply the only time a new reality was created was the last time round.
At least thats the way I see it (and hence the source code program then makes it itself appear redundant!)
But generally it's the source code itself that makes no sense. After all the suggestion is the recreation is based on the 8minutes of memory restored from the guy he takes over, so once he goes outside of this how does it work?
How can he relive the memories and know how any of these people will react to him doing different things?
They try to imply it isn't timetravel per say but for it to work it has to be.
But anyway, like I say I did enjoy it, but don't think it stands up too well to close inspection.
And Scott Bakula was Coulter's father on the phone. (Which was probably the best scene in the film)
"Thinking about it I don't think he was creating a new reality each time. After all there is the run where he saves the girl but when he goes back she is still dead. "
Yes, because he creates a new reality, saves the girl in that one, and then goes back to his reality, in which she's still dead. The only difference between the last jump and all the others is that he then stays in that new world. Again, that new world is the only one in which SC isn't used.
I agree entirely with the whole "memory period" thing being total nonsense. That's definitely just something that has to be swallowed.
I really didn't recognise Bakula, so thank you. Indeed, The Other Half suggested that was who he was (when I mentioned you'd said his voice was in there) and I still couldn't "see" it.
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