This is one of those titles that automatically turned me off: "I'm not enough of a computer geek to get into this." But such snap judgments lose their effectiveness with time, and the continuing popularity of SC was hard for me to ignore. Besides, I liked director Duncan Jones' work on Moon, and here was another sci-fi.
Twenty minutes into the future, if the already dated phone tech is any indication, a terrorist bombs a train in the Chicago area. An experimental government program under Dr. Rutledge (Jeffrey Wright) retrieves the last eight minutes of memory from one of the victims and sends the mind of biologically similar U.S. Army CPT Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) into it, enabling him to spend eight minutes finding the bomb and its planter however he can. He can retry any number of times, but the sooner he succeeds, the better their chances of preventing the bomber's next attack.
Reminds me a bit of Edge of Tomorrow. Like Cage, Stevens did not get into his situation voluntarily, is treated poorly by his superiors, has to experience the sensation of death many times, and ends up doing a lot of things we wouldn't accept from anyone who didn't have preternatural foresight and assurance of a reset option. He also falls in love with the woman who spends the most time with him in the loop, in this case Christina Warren (Michelle Monaghan), who was already on good terms with the man whose body he's inhabiting, teacher Sean Fentress. Probably very good terms, given how willing she is to forgive his seemingly insane, paranoid, sometimes violently criminal behavior.
I thought of further parallels to other works. Dr. Rutledge's insistence that any changes to the past won't affect the present timeline evokes Avengers: Endgame. Stevens alternating between the memory realm and a strange way of connecting with the program staff is somewhat like what happens in the Assassin's Creed games. Having to control someone else's body is a major premise in Your Name. And yes, there's a touch of Groundhog Day minus the comedy.
In Stevens' first run-through of the memory, he knows no more about the situation than any viewer who didn't read a summary, so he's freaking out as much as we would to discover a sudden new identity. I get that Rutledge et al. are in a big hurry, but what could they expect him to do without the slightest briefing? His primary point of contact, CPT Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga), acts as if he just got back from checking the mailbox or something. She's still more sympathetic than Rutledge, who's reluctant to give him the time of day. Or keep a promise. Perhaps the take-home message is that a zeal to fight monsters can lead us to shove aside all sorts of basic human decency and rationality.
The setup makes suspense a little challenging. We know that the second bomb could go off any minute, but the sense of urgency doesn't really build. To say there's a climax is a stretch.
I won't tell you the ending, but I find it both too happy and not happy enough. I'm not convinced it makes sense even within the movie's own logic. If you do accept it, yeah, it's more pleasant than the implied alternative, but there are severe issues in store when you think about it.
I appreciate that SC runs a brisk 93 minutes when it could easily have gotten bloated in the effort to spell things out. (None of the cycles actually run a full eight minutes in viewing time.) I won't call it brilliant, but it is heady, and there's plenty to discuss with someone else who's seen it.
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