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The core technology of Duncan Jones’s 2011 sci-fi film Source Code is quite complex. The film is about a super-advanced virtual reality technology called “Source Code” that can somehow reach into the past and psychically scan the minds of deceased people, recreating their environment based on the last 8 minutes of their lives. The Army is using the technology to scan the interior of a Chicago train that was bombed in a terrorist attack days earlier. With so many dead people, it’s possible to create a fully interactive virtual simulation.
Jake Gyllenhaal plays an army soldier named Captain Stevens who enters a simulation and takes over the body of one of the victims of the explosion. The superiors ordered Captain Stevens to determine the bomber’s identity based on this simulation so they could apprehend it and prevent any future attacks. Stevens has only eight minutes before the train explodes. If he fails, he is returned to the simulation and has to try again. Essentially, Stevens has an extra life in video games.
Stevens, however, is disoriented and enraged. He was never briefed on his mission and his last memory is of the battlefield in Afghanistan. Outside the simulation, Stevens is in a dark survey room, communicating with his superior officer (pre-Conjuring Vera Farmiga) only through a video screen. Inside the simulation, he cannot fully understand that the people he encounters are not real. He begins to feel that he can save them even though they are already dead.
The technology in Source Code is entirely fictional, but director Duncan Jones noted in a 2011 interview with io9 that the film’s terrorist was based on a real person he read about in the news.
The technology in the source code is fictitious, but the bomber was based on a real person.
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Source Code is a time travel thriller of sorts because Captain Stevens essentially goes back in time, reliving the same eight minutes over and over again. There are more twists to the story than described above, so VR technology may be a lot more complex than viewers initially think. And the ending includes a twist that many may not see coming.
The terrorist is eventually revealed to be a young man named Frost (Michael Arden), who was able to construct a dirty bomb in his home. Duncan Jones appears to have modeled Frost after the “Midwestern guy” who built his own breeder reactor in his mother’s backyard, which irradiated the entire neighborhood. He explained:
“And this happened about 15 years ago, not that long ago. He was incredibly smart and had absolutely no sense of right and wrong. He was just a very, very strange and very scary kid. And I thought that was an interesting idea: you could find someone who’s smart enough to build something like that, and their main reason for doing it is, “Well, I know how to do it, so I’ll do it.” And no understanding of whether he should do this or not. I think it was a very interesting starting point for this character.”
Jones can’t remember the man’s name, but he was probably referring to David Hahn, the child who set out to build a working breeder reactor in 1994. The case came to light in 1998 after an article in Harper’s Magazine and was detailed in a subsequent 2004 book called The Radioactive Boy Scout.
Duncan Jones recalls the incident with the radioactive Boy Scout
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David Hahn, for those unfamiliar with the case, lived in Commerce Township, Michigan. He had always been interested in radioactivity and engineering and, simply for the sake of the challenge, sought to build a working breeder reactor using only what he could assemble at age 17. He didn’t build a reactor, but he did manage to build an active neutron source. The story goes that he was stopped by police who found in his car some of the elements he used in the reactor. He collected radioactive elements from everyday objects; it seems that americium was present in ordinary smoke detectors, thorium in camp lanterns (Hahn was an experienced Boy Scout), and even radium in antique clocks.
Khan directly told police that the elements were radioactive, which led police to call the government. The Environmental Protection Agency had to clean up his amateur reactor laboratory. It turns out that Khan’s experiment was indeed dangerous: it produced 1000 times the normal background radiation. Looking at Khan after the incident, one can see the sad life of a troubled man. His mother committed suicide in 1996, and he joined the military for several years (he served on the USS Enterprise). However, he never gave up on his dream of building a nuclear reactor, and as recently as 2007, he was arrested for collecting more americium. He died in 2016 at the age of 39.
Khan never created a bomb like the one in Source Code and never intended to harm anyone. Duncan Jones, however, liked the idea of a genius child prodigy building a nuclear reactor without realizing it could be dangerous. He would have loved the movie “The Manhattan Project.”