The Last Movie I Saw

Based on just his first two features, I have to say I am mightily impressed with the work of director Duncan Jones. His first, Moon, struck me as a throwback to the kind of character driven science fiction I mostly associate with the classic radio programs Dimension X and X Minus 1 (which drew on the pulp stories of the forties and fifties, so I guess they exhibited the same characteristics, though I'm less familiar with them in that form). Now his second, Source Code, may be even better. I think what impresses me is that, while there are some special effects employed, this is not just an exercise in making things go boom (literally or figuratively), but rather a cool little morality play about the essential relationship between life and death. That theme plays out on several levels, as a soldier is repeatedly sent into the past to relive the same eight minutes over and over in an attempt to identify the person who planted a bomb on a train. Each successive trip allows him to accumulate more clues, but that is all ultimately secondary to the revelations the character (played well by Jake Gyllenhaal) has about his own fate and that of the other people he re-encounters over and over again (in both past and present). In the end, his discoveries earn him (and I really mean, he earns it) a happy ending. These days, most movies in this genre are all about the effects, so its nice to see that a really talented director has decided to turn down the noise and recognize how the conventions of science fiction can actually be used to tell a gripping story on a human scale. I was, to be honest, a little surprised at how good this was, but next time I see Jones' name in the credits, I'll be expecting hime to maintain this standard.