Eight minutes to life

Source Code didn't meet my expectations — and I mean that in a good way. I had settled down — a bucket of popcorn on my lap and a chocolate bar tucked safely in my bag — to watch an action-thriller, and I was a little confused when I started crying towards the end of the film.

My brother Nolan had told me that he wasn't sure if Jake Gyllenhaal was the action-thriller type, which was why he was having reservations watching Source Code. Well, now I can say Jake was perfect for the role of Captain Colter Stevens.

Capt. Stevens wakes up and finds himself on a train bound for Chicago, sitting across a beautiful woman named Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan), who seems to know him. She keeps calling him Sean and talking as if they had been carrying on a conversation for the longest time. His confusion, however, is soon terminated by a bomb explosion that destroys the train.

Capt. Stevens then wakes up inside a chamber and, after some confusion, recalls that he is on a mission to find the bomber who planted the bomb on that train because he was going to plant another bomb, a nuclear device, in downtown Chicago very, very soon. Helping Stevens is Air Force Capt. Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), who communicates, often rather cryptically, through a computer screen.

Goodwin tells him that he is inside a program called the Source Code, which, is actually a program that hacks into an alternate reality: the last eight minutes that remains of a person's memory. Stevens is entering -- and functioning in — the final eight minutes of a teacher named Sean Fentress' life. Sean died on the train to Chicago, which means that each time Goodwin enters the Source Code, he has to die all over again after eight minutes.

Each eight-minute trip, however, is valuable as Stevens can find more clues that leads him to the bomber. I won't say more about the plot, because I don't want to ruin the film for you.

I would like, however, to point out that with each eight-minute trip, Stevens finds out more and more what is truly valuable to him, as, I suppose, would anyone who gets the chance to actually think about his life and the life he leaves when he dies — and many times over.

This is when sci-fi thriller shifts into human story. Even as he seeks someone who is set to destroy his — or Sean's — life, Stevens tries to make sense of his own. No nuclear bomb threat is more important than his own life experience... and we get a glimpse of the freedom Stevens gets a glimpse of.

Time and again, in an attempt to remind myself to constantly pursue a meaningful life, I ask myself, “If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, how differently would you live today?” I'm always happy when I can't think of going about my day differently. For me, Source Code pushed the same question notches higher: “If you knew you were going to die in a few minutes, what would you do?”

My list is never-changing: 1. Tell the people I love that I love them. 2. Hold someone's hand. 3. Pray.

When I sat down to watch Source Code, I wasn't expecting for an important truth to be driven deeper into me. But it's never bad to be reminded that whatever it is that we have been taught to believe is important, love is always the bottom line.

Go catch Source Code. Unexpected, but true: it's a nice movie for Easter.

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