In genre fiction, science fiction is always tagged as “idea-driven fiction,” as if all science fiction has to sell is that one concept—wildly imaginative on the one hand, yet grounded in scientific logic on the other. That concept is to science fiction what a murder trick is to a classic whodunit: the trick has to be dazzling, or the whole work hardly has any value. And yet, after reading a serious literary classic, we may feel suddenly enlightened but later fail to remember even one complete sentence; after reading a mystery, we may be stunned by an ingenious murder trick and never forget it for the rest of our lives. Which is better? The question is impossible to answer. They’re simply different genres.
The painstaking craftsmanship of serious literature, every word polished to perfection, is a kind of greatness. So is building an entire science-fiction work around one concept, or one idea. Sometimes, the “simpler” it is, the more overwhelming the shock it delivers. Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama is a case in point: the idea of a “spaceship sixteen kilometers in diameter” is enough to carry an entire novel. You can do without plot, disregard character, violate the rules of literature—and still create the bible of hard science fiction, like a martial-arts master who goes mad from practicing his art and somehow still learns peerless kung fu. That kind of “idea” is science fiction’s beauty, its poetry. Science fiction isn’t supposed to do everything over and over again and cover every last detail; it’s supposed to take one and push it toward infinity. That’s an aesthetic of going from minimal to absolute.
A truly breathtaking science-fiction work should seize on one such idea and express it in the most vivid, the most sensational, or the most poetic form available. One is enough. Less is more; simplicity is elegance. Think of the supposedly greatest science-fiction films in movie history: no matter how complicated their details and world-building may be, can’t their core concepts all be summed up in a sentence or two? From The Terminator and The Matrix to Back to the Future, they all work that way. Even something as detail-heavy as Inception is no exception.
So how many ideas like that are there in the Source Code in front of us? Some people think Source Code is too simple—you can guess who the terrorist is during the very first eight-minute loop. But viewed from the angle of “ideas,” it’s actually too complicated.
Idea 1:
The film first reveals its science-fiction premise when it is one-third over. The doctor explains Source Code like this: “After a person dies, the energy of the brain’s electromagnetic field briefly remains, and the neural pathways stay open. The brain also has another feature: it can maintain a short-term memory track lasting about eight minutes. Put the two together, and the neural pathways left behind after death can trace memories back eight minutes; the Source Code world lets us use both at once.” (Idea 1 actually contains two ideas.)
Sound familiar? Of course it does, because this is just a variation on The Matrix. The only difference is that The Matrix uses data from human history as the model for a virtual world, while Source Code turns a pile of dead people’s memories into one. So the first shadow we see is The Matrix.
We also see the shadow of Fringe, naturally. The first season spends an entire half-season explaining how to dig information out of dead people’s brains. Fringe has one advantage over Source Code: it gives us plenty of details about this wildly metaphysical technology. It’s utter nonsense, but it has the flavor of hard science fiction. In Source Code, meanwhile, every single technical detail is simply missing.
Idea 2:
Here’s the problem: Idea 1 alone can’t effectively support any plot logic. Unless one of those dead people happened to know who the killer was during the last eight minutes of their life, what’s the use of reading their memories? This virtual world has to provide information beyond those eight minutes of their lives.
So we need a second idea. In comes the quantum-mechanical parallel-universe hypothesis, bizarrely enough. In one line, the doctor is still saying, “Source Code isn’t time travel, just a reconstruction of spacetime” (Idea 1); immediately afterward, it becomes, “It lets us enter a parallel universe…”
Combine Ideas 1 and 2, and the film’s setup up to this point becomes: residual memories in the victims’ brains are used to form a virtual world covering the eight minutes before their deaths. But this virtual world isn’t really a virtual world at all; it’s a parallel universe beginning eight minutes before the bomb explodes. From here on, what happens in that parallel universe has virtually nothing to do with the victims’ memories, because it can contain almost any information that wasn’t in those memories.
What an astonishingly bullshit-ridden piece of technology!
So now we see echoes of Donnie Darko, Southland Tales, Sliding Doors… and, once again, Fringe. After spending half a season on digging information out of dead people’s brains, that show spends another two and a half seasons on parallel universes.
Idea 3:
Here the problem returns. Judging from my extremely crude knowledge of physics, the quantum-mechanical parallel-universe hypothesis is about certain states of microscopic particles collapsing depending on the observer: a particle is in state A in one universe and state B in another. It has nothing to do with a temporal mismatch. The parallel-universe hypothesis in quantum mechanics does not allow you to return to a “past” universe.
So the parallel universe in Source Code has absolutely nothing to do with quantum mechanics. It’s simply a variation on time travel. Unlike the conventional time travel of Back to the Future, where there is only one space and only one past and future—change the past, and the future changes with it—Source Code has countless pasts and futures. The protagonist merely travels to a parallel universe out of sync in time. Changes made there affect only that universe’s future, not any other universe. In one parallel universe, he can stop the explosion; in that universe, the terrorist attack really is prevented and its future is changed. But that can’t change the fact that the explosion already happened in his original universe. All he can do is use information learned in the parallel universe to prevent a new terrorist attack in his own universe.
And so this technology keeps evolving in increasingly bullshit-filled ways. It has now become this: build, from a dead person’s memories, an entrance into a parallel universe, with the entrance opening eight minutes before the explosion.
Is that a particularly creative idea? Not necessarily. There aren’t many examples of this kind of time-travel idea, but there is one we know very well. Remember Trunks from Dragon Ball? In Dragon Ball, Krillin asks Trunks, who has come from the future: if the androids in this world are defeated, what happens to the androids in Trunks’s future—do they suddenly disappear? Trunks answers that the future of this world has nothing to do with his own future world. They are two parallel spaces. Before Trunks traveled across, their trajectories were the same; they were simply at different points in time. Trunks’s world had already reached some future year, while Krillin’s was only a little over a decade behind. Trunks changes the future of Krillin’s world, but he cannot directly affect his own future world. His original purpose was simply to bring this world’s Goku to his world to defeat the androids. The traveling in Source Code is exactly the same situation as Trunks’s.
Idea 4:
The problem comes back again. We’ve created an entrance to a parallel universe, but that still isn’t enough. As spectacular as this technology is, it can’t observe a parallel universe from the all-knowing perspective of God. Someone has to cross over. And in Source Code, the protagonist doesn’t travel bodily back into the past; his soul takes over the body of one of the victims. That really is time travel in the sense used by Chinese time-travel fiction: aren’t 80 percent of those stories about a modern woman possessing the body of some ancient concubine and then ruling the imperial harem? The resemblance is uncanny.
The doctor in Source Code explains this kind of crossing over as follows: “Sean died on that train. Among all the passengers, he’s your best link. Your sex, body type, and synaptic compatibility are excellent.” So Avatar barges in once again. The crossing over in Source Code is basically a hybrid of Chinese time-travel fiction and Avatar. The time-travel fiction flooding China’s market has finally achieved enlightenment in Duncan Jones.
And so Source Code gains yet another technological capability: consciousness travel. Faced with technology this godlike, Cameron, J. J., Cixin Liu, and the rest of you can do nothing but tremble.
Idea 5:
The problems continue. The window into the parallel universe opened by the dead person’s memories can last only eight minutes. Once those eight minutes are up, the protagonist’s crossing ends and his consciousness jumps back to his original universe. The exception comes at the very end, when Captain Goodwin has a change of heart and ends the protagonist’s life. This time, his consciousness fails to jump back to the original universe and instead remains—possibly forever—in Sean’s body in the universe he last crossed into.
Let’s return to the film’s final scene. It’s very easy to misread.
In the universe he crossed into for the last time—the universe where he will also live from then on—the protagonist sends a message to Captain Goodwin in that universe. He says, “Sometime today, you’ll hear that an attempted terrorist attack was discovered on a train near Chicago,” and then, “You and I stopped the bomb from exploding.” (Pay attention: this sentence is not part of what she hears.) Captain Goodwin then comes to the doctor’s office. An officer is briefing the doctor, saying, “An attempted bombing was discovered on a commuter train near Chicago, but the bomb was disarmed and a suspect was caught on the train.”
There are two easy ways to misread this scene.
First, the Goodwin and doctor we see here are not the ones who have kept appearing throughout the film. They are the Goodwin and doctor of this parallel universe, making their first appearance right here.
Second, when the officer reports the foiled terrorist attack, he isn’t, as many people understand it, confirming with the doctor that Source Code worked and prevented the attack. The truth is that, in this universe, neither the doctor nor the officer knows that Source Code has already worked once. The officer’s subtext is actually: “It’s a shame this terrorist attack was foiled. Otherwise, this time we could have tested what Source Code can do.” That’s why the doctor immediately says, “Until the day the real crisis finally rears its head, Source Code will have its use.” The doctor in this universe has no idea that this so-called “foiled attack” is actually the indirect result of activating Source Code in another parallel universe.
In this universe, only Captain Colter Stevens realizes via text message that Source Code has somehow worked its magic; everyone else remains completely in the dark. “If you receive this email, it means Source Code worked even better than you and the doctor expected”—that is the most wonderfully twisted thing about Source Code. It cannot stop the crises that have already happened in this universe, yet it can avert crises in other parallel universes, while the universes that benefit from Source Code never even realize where their good fortune came from.
That is the most intriguing idea in Source Code.
The best science-fiction “idea” has to be wildly imaginative while still obeying scientific logic. Ideally, it should also come with scientific details to support it. But even that is not enough: it ought to possess a certain dramatic twist.
Source Code had that potential, but sadly, its most interesting idea gets drowned out by far too many ideas that feel familiar. Almost every one of the ideas mentioned above could have carried an entire science-fiction work, and in fact each of them has already helped create more than a few science-fiction classics—not to mention the other smaller ideas I have not brought up, such as the sequence in which the badly wounded protagonist is put to use as disposable material, which is far too much like RoboCop…
That is not to say ideas cannot be borrowed. Duncan Jones’s Moon uses the utterly commonplace science-fiction idea of “clones,” but as long as you seize on that one thing and express it vividly, that is enough. The problem is not borrowing; it is borrowing so uneconomically.
Source Code violates the aesthetics of the science-fiction idea. A collage of science-fiction ideas, unsupported by credible scientific detail, makes science fiction slide into fantasy, giving Source Code a whiff of pop-science crankery. At heart, Source Code is the same kind of thing as the recent Wu Xia: doing pop-science crankery in the name of science. It could simply have seized on one idea and developed it to the fullest. Parallel universes in quantum mechanics are such an irresistible idea—how many people were looking forward to seeing the quantum rose from Cixin Liu’s science-fiction classic Ball Lightning bloom on the big screen? Very few science-fiction films have truly succeeded in presenting an idea like that. Why wrap it in a pile of familiar ideas? Was the ambition too great, or was the confidence too weak?
The quantum mechanics in Source Code was originally a rose. Sadly, that rose was stuck in a pile of cow dung.
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