Source Code: Living the last 8 minutes of your life

A dream within a dream, lives lived within a life, deaths within a death. Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Captain Stevens, is an action-thriller that a viewer will have to think about again and again. It comes close to the genre of movies like Inception and Shutter Islands.

The story line focuses on a life that Captain Stevens had to live inside the source code. The sci-fi side of the movie is that the source code is a constructed reality that exists only in the last functioning neurons of a dead man's brain connected in wires to the computer.

Through the source code, people on the other side of a reality parabola can communicate with each other and so affect each other's realities. Complicated it may seem, but the concept of the source code is like a time-space, with connection between the past and present, or that of paranormal time-space that links the dead and those alive.

For someone who had consciousness in his subconscious, the movie's storyline can be easily grasped. I mean by some one aware or had experiences of being waken up in a dream within a dream, or mesmerized by a series of recurrent dreams with little variations in its repeats.

The movie does not have grand production designs and the visual effects are but ordinary. What I like so much with it is how it masterfully put a storyline about something occurring in the subconscious of the mind into the conscious. Another thing is the concept of the 8-minutes of memory that is kept within a dying man's brain. Again, this relates to stories of near death experience where a flash of memories appear so vivid to those near death.

The story is fiction of course, but it crafts various beliefs of people about death and life and the realities of changing one's or others' future. People have always been fascinated to the idea of going back in a point of time to change any regretful moment in their present and to ensure that their future will be alright.

The ethical question in the movie's representation of scientific and military advancement is the manipulation of a human being, for the common good, even if it is against some social norms and morals. The movie showed Captain Steven's useless and almost lifeless half body being used in the experiment, giving it a chance to live in a constructed life-reality that only exists in the mind but is connected to change the physical reality.

It was bit boring in the beginning because of the repetitiveness of actions. After the first scene of waking up in another man's body and life-reality, the captain appears in the source code in connection with the scientists in the physical world. This tunes the viewers to immediately know what the source code is all about -- an experimental connection between two realities.

What fascinates me much is that of the concept of the last 8 minutes of one's life. I'd rather have the movie titled "8 minutes" than "Source Code". It lingered in my brain's worms, how that few minutes in one's brain could make a dying person's memory a heaven or a hell of his life to take in his afterlife?

Just consider how the computer, which has similarities with our brain's memory function, could shut down improperly and ruin everything that its memory could take when it turns on again. Bad memories stored in our brain are like bile of toxins, they kill and make our life as hell. But all beautiful memories that we keep give us joy and peace, that is heaven.

This life or the next, this time or the future, the past or the present are all constructed realities, each one is connected to another. As it is true in the movie, we can choose the memories we want in our realities. However, we can only do this if we are conscious of our lives and the time of our dying. We might as well believe the maxim "live this day as if it were your last", or "make every time the last 8 minutes of your life".