Pun Salad

I initially thought this would be 90 minutes of Jake Gyllenhaal reciting snippets of C, or discussing the inner workings of the Linux kernel. But no. As near as I can tell, no actual source code is shown or referenced. It's nevertheless a pretty decent movie.

Jake plays Captain Colter Stevens, whose last memories are of his service as a chopper pilot in Afghanistan. He suddenly finds himself on a Chicago commuter train, being chatted up by an attractive woman (Michelle Monaghan), who appears to know him. This is, of course, confusing to him.

I think I yelled at the screen: "Dude, it's Michelle Monaghan. Just go with it, see what happens!"

Unfortunately, what happens is that the train blows up. And Stevens finds himself in some sort of capsule, even more disoriented, talking to a high-tech anti-terrorist team. And this is reality: the explosion has already happened, but thanks to some very impressive pseudo-scientific verbiage and handwaving, Stevens' conciousness can be beamed into one of the victims' heads shortly before it occurs. His mission is to discover the culprit, and prevent an even more dastardly deed in the works. He chooses to take on two additional tasks: to find out the reality of his situation and (seemingly hopeless) to save the train and its passengers.

Definitely an above-average science-fiction thriller. It's directed by Duncan Jones, who previously directed Moon a couple years back.