[Movie] Source Code

Wondering what the hell happened to the real sean fentress guy after his body gets taken over. Do they swap bodies?

if source code can alter the real world, how come it only altered the real world after colton's last run?

for example in one run, he confronts a man and kills himself on a train track, with christina still alive

then that one doesn't make it into the real world?

or does it make it, and the last run he does where he saves everyone overlaps that world?

i guess that's what happened..

+ Show Spoiler +

There's only one real world. That's the one where they find the van, everyone in that facility is celebrating, and the girl presses the red button and terminates the the captain's life support. That real world is only changed because the captain was able to report the information on who the bomber is.

After that, it freezes on them kissing and then continues. After 8 minutes, he usually ceases to exist in that alternate reality. But it continues because, I guess, that terminating his life support doesn't return him to the real world but lets him "live on" in this alternate reality.

This concept is pretty much all about parallel universes, mostly found in movies dealing with time travel. Like how if you go back in time, change something huge, return to the future, that future is different than what you had known it to be because by changing something huge you made an alternate reality. So when he dies on the train track, that's one different reality/universe. There's another alternate reality/universe where he and the train girl die next to the white van. And each time he's injected into the source code, it essentially "creates" a different alternate reality. Although "creates" may be a tricky word because he might only be injected into and exist in different alternate realities (only to cease to exist in those alternate realities after 8 min). That last run is just another alternate reality/universe, out of the billions and billions of alternatives... decisions decisions... forks in roads forks in roads...

At least that's my take on it

Trippy movie. Cool stuff

Indeed, the only way the idea of stepping into another person and playing out in an unknown world would work (technomumbojumbo included) is if it's a different cosmos. How would he find a van that nobody involved with the "simulation" knew about, and pull details previously never seen out. The 8 minutes wasn't even how long he lasted in at least 1 narrative. When he got hit by the train, he lasted long after he usually did.

I any event, I'm glad the big reveal of how it works was actually wrong, I was worried of how stupid the explanation was.

I feel like the last 30 minutes or so were infinitely better than the first 60. It turns from a srs bzns thriller into a deep drama(can't think of a better word). I thought that sending the email to Goodwin before they start using Source Code and completely changing her ideas on how there is only one "real" world was brilliant.

Also remember in the "real" world, Goodwin said "everything will be all right" to Colter. Is that a hint?

I was very disappointed, I feel like the movie went for 2 different plot lines and messed up both, 1 was the bomb plot but there was never real pressure, urgency, or fear in that one, aside from the persistent warnings of "we're running out of time" and the doctor having him do continuous runs (which he actually didn't) there was never like a "YOU HAVE 1 MORE TRY" moment, he finds the guy in one of the runs and gets shot, which would have been heart-stopping If we suddenly forgot that he was in the source code and thought that he would die for real sadly I didn't which meant I was never really interested in the bomb plot, it was resolved in a pretty straight forward manner and pretty quickly

The other plot was the whole "look what we're doing here's the next inception" thing with the source code, the problem with this is, well, this is an actual hypothesis the whole parallel universe/multiverse idea but this movie doesn't do anything interesting with it, it lets him go in and change another universe but it's a one way street and frankly it doesn't matter to me if there are a million perfect or terrible other universes if they cannot contact ours, inception on the other hand actually put the idea in everyone's head "is this all a dream" and the ending with him getting it right in 1 universe? Well that actually just reminded me that there were about a dozen other universes where we know that the train blew up.

So with all of this I feel like the bomb plot would have been the easier one to fix and focus on, sure it wouldn't have been as impressive as inception, but better to be a solid action movie than in my opinion fail pretty hard, for this plot well let's see, they could have had some actual false alarms not just accuse 3 people, look through their bags, and blame the Arab who obviously wasn't the terrorist because racial profiling is wrong, they could have actually brought some people in in real life, wasted a lot of time and given him like 1 more go to figure it out, then in that go have him be in some situation where he's like dying (let's say gets shot) then sees/figures out who the person is just in time. This all I feel would have very much helped the film

But if they did want to go the inception route I think they could have at least made it matter in our world, something like he sends out something like the email he sent, then the movie looks like he couldn't go back in time in our world but you see whatever he sent may or may not have gotten through in the end, like the whole "the totem stopped/it didn't" inception debate, this I think would have worked less well than the straight action movie approach but still would have been more interesting to me than the movie as is.

The Source Code isn't a simulation at all, but a way to transport people between parallel universes. In the last text message that Colter sent, he basically tells Goodwin that Source Code "creates whole new worlds."

The "8 minutes max before you're transported back" by Rutledge is wrong. Colter in Sean's body survives over 8 minutes in the universe where he is run over by the train (we see the bomb go off in the distance, when he SHOULD have died), and also the one where he is shot by the bomber. You are transported back when you die in the "other" universe, not when exactly 8 minutes is up, assuming you can survive what caused the original person to die. When Goodwin pulled the plug in the "original world," there was no way for Colter in Sean's body to get back... so he is stuck in the new universe where he saved both the train and the city, which is what he wanted.

Also, in the text message in the parallel universe, he tells Goodwin to remind Colter (the one in the lab in this new universe, not the one in Sean's body, there are two Colter consciousnesses in this universe) that "everything will be okay." In the beginning of the movie, Goodwin says this to Colter, suggesting that there may have been many other disasters that Colter prevented in several different parallel universes, sending a text message to Goodwin each time to remind the "lab Colter" of the power of Source Code. This tells us that the train disaster was likely not the first one Colter averted. Of course, each Colter in someone else's body would only have knowledge of the disaster he prevented due to the way this loop works, so the Colter that we follow in the movie probably has no knowledge of any other disasters that the "other" Colters have prevented before him. Very similar to Moon in this respect.

Summary: there's no "real" or "fake" world. Everything is real, including the parallel universes where the train bomb and possibly city bomb explode. Colter has also very likely prevented many other disasters, though each individual consciousness of Colter would only know of the one disaster it has stopped.

Sorry I needed to get that down on paper.

Though I think the movie would have been just as good if it ended on the freeze frame... and if Source Code really was just a simulation.

When the whole train froze when they disconnected him, was the perfect time to end the show. Would give the show a sorta bittersweet, poignant end. Instead...they tried too hard...parallel universe...SIGH

It's not just the ending and parallel universes.
Let's recap some things:
You're dead but we won't let you die because we've plugged you to life support.
Shoutout to Mr. Schroedinger!

Yeah, tell him some things, then tell him he doesn't really have any choice because you're going to send him back in again and again and again, regardless of his choice. Then, when he's got enough:
*playback dad's speech*
- Send me back in!

Stuff like that made it really crappy.

Instead of all this bullshit, they could've opted for a singularity approach, where they've developed some early form of this technology but don't fully understand it yet. They have extracted dying soldier's consciousnes, as well as someone's from the train (whose head was miraculously preserved well enough or something, with the last 8 minutes of memory remaining). Now they're sending him in there, which would be the equivalent of loading a save game right at the moment when a boss jumps at you, no going back and must figure out how to beat him. Then, focus the movie on his efforts within the train, trying out various things, instead of this "am I dead or what?", "can I save them and why not?" bullshit.
Could have made for an interesting detective story at least...

just take over the other guys life? what happend to the guy he took over... why does he have no say in it? and its not even a true happy ending its just a big lie basically