Friday, May 13, 2011

Source Code - When 'the what' vanquishes 'the how'

Source Code is not your run-of-the-mill movie, or is it? It has that characteristic ingredient of  Indian films and food - masala, garbed well in true-Hollywood-style to make the end product look sauve and the audience feel intelligent. Like our own Amir Khan films do, some may argue.
A single-slider-on the film could look somewhat like this -
A. Star-Trekish theme of alternate reality, time-travel ('time-rearragement', ingenuous) revisited
B. Screen mostly inhabited by the yeh-mein-naheen-hoon & mein-kahaan-hoon hero
B. Doses of romance intermittently sprinkled
C. The usual-racial-suspects-red-herring-routine dropped along the way,
D. Will-the-misunderstood-beta-baap-equation-sort-out question dangled
E.  Show a lab full of farily-ubiquitious techno-gadgetary (laptops, web-cams etc). add a dark-room, a time travel-dabba  and a few military-attired-scientists-like-amigos and an amiga, to boot
F. Explode a bomb over & over again with different camera angles, camera shots and cameras, until..
G. .. you get into the final sequence and the inevitable twist..

For a sci-fi film that sends the hero ad-nauseum into the past , the makers just do not bother to let the viewers know 'how'. And when the poor protagonist asks exactly this to Scientist-de-chief, we are told that that is too complicated for the hero and ostensibly, the audience, to comprehend. And that, well, is that.

Nor do the makers really bother to explain why the project in the film and the film itself is named 'source code'.  '8 minutes' may have been more apt, but less enigmatic..

Which is probably, why the film works, commerically, i mean.

2 comments:

  1. Well i saw the trailer and felt its "main Kahan Hoon" and the love angle and decided not to see.

    As for the 'How' of time travel, knowing the journey of Amino acid from primordial soup to this level of complexity and reading all that Asimov, Penrose, Gribbin, Michio Kaku and Sagan and rest of them I know its not possible physically to travel in time.... mentally or in VR we may.

    Its the one 'How' that puts me off in all Sci-Fi

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  2. Hawking's view (2010) -> http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2010/07/stephen-hawking-time-travel-to-the-future-is-possible.html
    Carl Sagan (1999) -> http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/physics/Sagan-Time-Travel.html
    Of course, the sub-continental philosophical frameworks' proponents (Buddhism, Jaina, Adi Shankara, Madhwacharya et al) had their own view of time. One view among these - for e.g. - considers time and space to be relativistic constraints. And since it is relative, each individual experience these constraints from her frame of reference and therefore experiences it differently. So, time-travel has a relativistic connotation here.

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