Postavant

After some interaction with the various characters in his train car, many of whom become more important as the story unfolds (particularly Christina… but I won’t say why, and mention her in part to just raise the question of who the female lead might be), Colter heads to the bathroom where, quite surprisingly, he finds a bomb. Unfortunately, just after Colter finds it, a cell-phone detonator is triggered and…

…he’s killed. In fact, the entire train explodes. There’s a big ball of fire and, for just eight frames of film, some other cryptic goings on that only make sense later. We’re now seven or eight minutes in and about to be shocked.

…Colter awakens again, this time in an Isolation Unit where he’s being debriefed by a man named Goodwin, perhaps symbolically so. It seems that Captain Colter Stevens has just been living through a virtual simulation of the incident on the train in order to discover who it was that bombed it.

The cellphone maguffin is a smart one because everybody on the train will have one but finding the right one will also identify who the terrorist is. Simple, but sweet.

As the story goes on, there are only two types of scene – those that show Colter’s next journey into the same few simulated minutes on the train, and those that take place in the rather austere Isolation Unit in which he’s expected to report his findings and some unexpected twists come into play. Pretty soon there’s a suggestion that there’s more to the simulation than meets the eye and Colter may even be able, somehow, change history and prevent the train from exploding. It’s not unike a video game in which he’s stuck on the same level, dying over and over, repeated and repeated with a new approach to playing every time.

I was put in mind of Twelve Monkeys and the end of the story definitely has a few echoes of something from Brazil, but aside from the Gilliam resonances, there’s perhaps a mild whiff of Tony Scott’s Deja Vu too, as well as the House episode House’s Head, a certain bit of the UK version of Life on Mars and, I’ll say it so nobody else has to, Groundhog Day and Jack Sholder’s 12:01. The beginning certainly has a Final Destination vibe too, though the film heads off into completely distinct territory once the train has exploded.