source code

With the lack of posting I naturally also got a bit behind with posting reviews of stuff.

It's actually a short week for me as I'm off on holiday Friday (thank god) so I thought I'd post reviews today and tomorrow before wrapping the week up.

So a few weeks back I watched source code.

I actually quite enjoyed it, but I'll actually start at the end, if you see what I mean.

No, I don't either - what I mean is, I'll run through my thoughts as soon as the film ended.  They went a bit like this:

"Well that was quite good.  Bit of a paradoxical ending, but then the whole thing was a bit paradoxical.  And if you go with m theory I guess it's not a paradox in a way.

"Actually, you know they could even make a sequel.  Actually, I think it would make a better TV series.  You could well imagine him popping into different people each episode and solving a different problem.

"Where have I heard that before?  Wasn't that what happened in Quantum Leap?  Hang on, the whole thing is really like Quantum Leap, isn't it?"

So I should explain a few things.  The film doesn't quite join all the dots in terms of what's happening, but it seems to make use of m theory.  M theory is one f those areas of physics that strays right into science fiction territory.  It's basically the idea of multiple dimensions.

So in this film they're essentially using m-theory to repeatedly bounce into dimensions (or, potentially, they're creating them - as I say, it doesn't fully explain things) that are only fractionally different to ours and then find out the answer to a particular question.  I won't go too much into the detail as it would spoiler things a bit, but it's quite a neat idea.

Paradoxes are one of things that are difficult to explain without using an example, and the classic example of one in time travel (which is sort of what this is) is going back and killing your own father/mother/grandparents/ancestor before they spawn the next generation.  If you do this, then logically you never came into existence and hence you could not go back and kill your ancestor.

But as I say, if  it's m-theory, then you're obviously not technically changing your own time line, you're popping back into the timeline of other dimensions.  Indeed, the events "changed" in those alternate dimensions could be what originally happened or you could be creating those dimensions through the very act of your travel.  It's the Back to the Future 2 alternate 1985 bit where everybody who isn't a physicist gets confused.

Anyway, the real point I was trying to make and then used up a lot of words talking about other interesting stuff was that it treads around in the waters of Quantum Leap.  Quantum Leap was a science fiction show I really enjoyed as a kid where the main character hops around in time, leaping into the bodies of other people and then "fixing" or "altering" things in a positive way before he can move on.  The paradoxes created in that show were never really explored, but Source Code plays with those ideas more.

It also repeatedly uses the same time slot, which makes things a bit like Groundhog Day as he 'remembers' what's going to happen.

I think you can probably tell from the above I rather enjoyed the film, because it let me think about this sort of stuff, but also, crucially it has at its core some really good character stuff.  In a way it's more like a love story than it is a science fiction story, it just uses the sci-fi stuff in a clever way to help enhance that story too.