Source Code: a blast from the past

In 2009 Duncan Jones finally made his mark as a filmmaker at the not-so-young age of 38 thanks to his inventive feature debut Moon and without any help from his father David Bowie. Two years on, Jones's career is set to go stratospheric with his new movie Source Code - another sci-fi film but this time set on earth.

As Source Code earns Jones great reviews and plaudits ranging from 'the new Christopher Nolan' to 'Hitchcockian', the director who was once known as Zowie Bowie looks more than ready to cast off the shadow of his famous father.

Source Code stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Colter Stevens, a US military helicopter pilot serving in Afghanistan. But as the film opens, he wakes from a nap on a commuter train heading toward Chicago. With no idea how he got there, he runs into the toilets to see another man's face staring back at him. Eight minutes into the movie, the train carriage blows up.

Stevens doesn’t die in the blast but wakes up in a dimly lit capsule back in Afghanistan. It transpires that he is a participant in an army intelligence experiment called 'Source Code'.

Via video link, two military commanders (Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright) tell him that the train did blow up, earlier that day, and that the bomber has threatened to follow up the attack by detonating a dirty bomb in downtown Chicago. Stevens's mission is to continually relive the last eight minutes of the commuter's life in a race to find the bomb and identify the bomber.

Source Code began life as a studio screenplay but feels like it was written with Jones in mind. Gyllenhaal's scenes in the claustrophobic capsule recall an isolated and increasingly deranged Sam Rockwell in Moon.

Just as Moon evoked 2001, Source Code calls to mind Groundhog Day and North by Northwest. It also riffs on Speed by way of The Matrix, Inception and Deja vu. Yet despite its many influences, Source Code is convincing, slick and highly entertaining.

WHAT THE CRITICS ARE SAYING:Catherine Shoard, the Guardian: "Within minutes you're nodding along to the Groundhog-Day-from-hell logic. But rather than just learning to be less grumpy, like Bill Murray, Gyllenhaal must save the world, and against two separate ticking clocks." (4/5 stars)

Kim Newman, Empire: "An exciting, intellectually stimulating science-fiction thriller which also connects emotionally. Everyone involved earns a promotion to the premiership. " (4/5 stars)

Andrew Barker, Variety: "Source Code subsists on a sustained note of claustrophobia - both physical and temporal - and Jones handles the gradual widening of the film's visual scope with great aplomb, moving from tight angles and disorienting cutting to something more stable and comprehensible. " ·