People kept sending me this YouTube stop motion bookstore video, and finally I watched it. Now in love.

And I have to agree with him. It’s just beautiful and it must have taken an incredible amount of time. If you watch the section with a clock in view, two hours pass just for that short sequence. And, while I’m a big fan and proponent of digital publishing, I do also agree with the final sentiment of the film (read the cover of the last book).

Enjoy.

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Writing With No Regrets
by Lorna Suzuki

In my short fiction-writing career, I’ve been blessed and more fortunate than most writers, especially being that I am an indie author.

I know many authors seek validation by being published through traditional means, even if it’s not one of the big six. They believe traditional publishing means they are now credible writers, even though some question the quality of some of these books being published. Once, an aspiring author seeking traditional publication mentioned that writers like me are ‘jumping the queue’, thereby making it harder for serious writers like him to compete in this business. I’ve even been to writers conferences and have overheard authors seeking traditional publication speak of how they’d ‘never stoop so low as to resort to self-publishing’ as they, with their noses turned up, rushed by workshops covering this very topic.

For me, I’m proudly indie and deliberately so. I never started writing fantasy with the intention of becoming rich, receiving a huge advance from a large publishing company or to have my name on the cover of a book. Maybe I’m naïve to be happy knowing my fantasy series is slowly but steadily gathering a following and making its way into libraries in Canada and the U.S., but writing fiction for a living was something I never truly considered.

I wrote my fantasy series as a lasting gift to my daughter. I created an imaginary realm filled with characters whose stories I felt were worth sharing with the world.

Now, for those who say I was never published traditionally because my work is mediocre and I just couldn’t land an agent: I’ve had two literary agents in the past, the last had an excellent track record with multi-book deals with the big publishing houses in New York. The whole experience was not exactly soul-crushing, more disheartening than anything else.

I released my last agent, and used Kim Roberts, one of Hollywood North’s most talented, knowledgeable entertainment attorneys (and producer of Sepia Films) to negotiate a wonderful option agreement with a fantastic production company.

Even with agent representation, it’s been either the editors or president of publishing companies I’ve met on my own, than via any agent introduction.

In the case of one successful, growing Canadian publishing company, the president of Libros Libertad had been following my writing career via the local newspapers and on TV. He contacted me when I was in the midst of meetings with a film producer seeking rights to option my adult fantasy series. The president of this company was pleasant, professional and as a writer, he understood the challenges many authors face, and that many worthy novels never get out there because the competition is fierce.

We did have couple of great meetings, and I did go as far as reviewing a publishing contract, but the burden of negotiating film rights had far greater precedence at the time, so I had to decline his offer of a multi-book deal to focus on this.

The next person interested in publishing rights for the adult fantasy came from the editor of Raincoast Publishing (their claim to fame was being the publisher of the Harry Potter series in Canada). I met Raincoast editor Jessie Finkelstein at the Surrey International Writers Conference. When we were discussing the Imago fantasy series, Ms. Finkelstein loved the concept of a strong female protagonist that had NO supernatural powers to take on much larger opponents. She found it refreshing that I featured a petite female warrior, one that used her intuition, years of training and smarts to overcome challenges to survive in a world that was not tolerant of her type, the only half human/half elf being in her realm.

Ms. Finkelstein loved that the female protagonist had fighting skills grounded in reality (based on my style of martial arts), blended in with a high level of action as well as a poignant story that touched on real world issues like overcoming racial and religious intolerance, male chauvinism, abuse and the will to survive against incredible odds.

She loved the concept so much, but Raincoast specializes in YA fiction, not adult fantasy. Because Ms. Finkelstein was aware of the level of violence and the sexual content, she had to ask: “Are you willing to rewrite your series for a YA audience?”

Now, some writers struggling to be picked up by a traditional publishing house denounced me as being crazy for giving the answer I did, but I already had a growing fan base of very loyal Imago fans, the ones who drop everything to attend my annual book launches to get their next fantasy fix. At the risk of being accused of selling out or disappointing the fans that loved the series written with an adult audience in mind, I had no choice but to say no to Ms. Finkelstein.

Do I regret saying no to her? Do I ever wonder what would have happened if I did rewrite to fit Raincoast’s catalogue? The answer is no.

Just last month, the executive producer who had optioned rights for the first three novels in the Imago series for a major motion picture trilogy contacted me. A publisher in Asia who knew of my series and the impending movie project asked the executive producer to contact me to see if I’d be interested in negotiating rights for the release of the Imago series in Asia.

I was flattered they wanted this, but for me, I didn’t even bother asking the executive producer who they were and what were they willing to offer.

Crazy, right?

Maybe… but for me, I’m a firm believer that things will happen when they are supposed to happen and whom they are supposed to happen with. And like my female protagonist, I tend to follow my intuition. I’ve spent much of my life multi-tasking on so many levels. Somewhere along the line, this means something can suffer in the process. I felt it was better for me to focus on one project at a time. As the creative consultant of the upcoming motion picture trilogy, it’s better to give the proper care and attention to the movie project now, than to regret it later.

Now, don’t get me wrong. When the time is right, under the proper terms and conditions with the most suitable traditional publishing company, I might consider an offer. It will have to be right on many levels for me to give up self-publishing, especially in light of the fact J.K. Rowling, with her Pottermore.com website, has almost single-handedly made self-publishing respectable now.

In the meantime, I’m quite happy being indie. For now, the executive producer wants me to continue building the fan base as we march toward full production! So, off I go, trying to win readers over one book at a time. And thank you, Alan, for inviting me to do this guest blog.

You can find Lorna on twitter: @LornaSuzuki
Or at her website: http://web.me.com/imagobooks.ca

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Here’s the thing on YouTube.

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I found this via Chuck Wendig’s Tumblr, and I love it so much I want to punch it in the face.

So, the problem, if you can call it that, with the last Harry Potter film is that it’s all the last cup. It’s all resolution, action-packed climax. But that’s okay. Because seven previous films have done all the work of the first two acts.

Say what you will about J K Rowling and the Harry Potter stories, there’s something truly amazing about the achievement. Sure, the stories may be derivative, distillations of so much fantasy that’s gone before. But everything is informed by something. Sure, Rowling may not be the greatest writer on the planet, but she does spin a yarn that keeps you reading, and what more do we really want than that? These aren’t wanky literary explorations of language and word form. They’re rollicking yarns, aimed mainly at young people. And Rowling does have a dab hand at naming things. She comes up with the best names.

I was a bit of a critic at first, especially of the first couple of books. Poorly written, derivative stories that insult the genre, blah, blah, blah. Yes, I’m blah, blah, blahing myself. It’s true to some extent, but Rowling kept going, she created a remarkable world and truly interesting characters. Well, mostly. Ginny Weasley, for example, was always a bit of a glyph. But Rowling got young people excited about books again, and for that she deserves a knighthood or a statue or something. We can forgive the small things in the face of the big achievement.

And that achievement is seven books that sell better than the Bible. A merchandising empire that makes nation states weep. Rowling is worth an estimated £500 million. That’s pounds sterling. That’s a mental amount of money from writing about a boy wizard. On top of that, we’ve got the films.

Never has a film franchise like this happened before. Sure, there have been film series’, though none with a single story that runs to eight full-length episodes. There have been characters who have cropped up way more than seven times, like James Bond. But each of those is a seperate story, and there have been many actors playing Bond. To have a story like Harry Potter extend over eight films, over ten years, with the same cast literally growing up as their characters is something we may never see again.

Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Grint (Harry, Hermione and Ron) from the first film and the last.

It would be fantastic if some other great book series’ received the same kind of treatment, but it’s unlikely. Not often does a prospect like Potter come along. Very few stories will guarantee a return on investment like Harry Potter does. It’s beyond mainstream; it’s ubiquitous. Producers and financers knew they could pretty much spend carte blanche on Harry Potter films and guarantee getting their money back several times over. Nothing is a safe bet like that in this world. Rowling created that – a guaranteed massive return investment. And you thought her magic was all fiction. This last installment shattered box office records worldwide, with US$169.2 million in US and Canadian ticket sales over the opening weekend. The opening weekend! And they’ve yet to truly milk it, with the rest of its cinema run, then DVDs, then special edition DVDs, then 8 film boxed sets. Not to mention all the associated merchandising.

Then there’s Pottermore to keep the whole thing monetised. Then there’s always the possibility of more books. The whole 19 Years Later thing at the end of the story is there as some kind of cap, but there are loads of ways around that if Rowling chooses to write more.

Of course, the real test of Rowling’s skill will be to write something else. Amazing as the Potter success is, she’ll always be measured against it and may not be able to write any other stories. I hope not. I hope she comes up with something all new, completely unrelated to Harry Potter and his world of wizards and witches, though I doubt she will.

So, for now at least, it’s over. It really is the end of an era. Children started reading books with the success of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. They grew up alongside their favourite characters while film stars grew up playing those characters. I’m glad to have seen it through. There’s a good sense of closure now and the books and films will stand as one of the greatest storytelling achievements of all time.

I’m still left with one question unanswered. Why does Harry Potter, or any other witch or wizard, wear glasses? They can regrow bones, for goodness sake. Surely they can fix a spot of myopia. Then again, perhaps it’s good to be left with some questions. Well done J K Rowling, and well done Harry, Hermione and Ron. You all did good.

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After seven books and eight films and more merchandising than you can fit in George Lucas’s ego, Rowling has now announced a website which will be a complete interactive experience for all ages based on her stories. Along with that she’s announced that for the first time ebook editions of the Harry Potter series will be made available. Well, legal ebook editions that is. Rowling truly is the master at monetising her ideas and characters, having turned some books about wizards at school into an international behemoth across all media.

With Pottermore, as the press release says:

For this groundbreaking collaborative project, J.K. Rowling has written extensive new material about the characters, places and objects in the much-loved stories, which will inform, inspire and entertain readers as they journey through the storylines of the books. Pottermore will later incorporate an online shop where people can purchase exclusively the long-awaited Harry Potter eBooks, in partnership with J K Rowling’s publishers worldwide, and is ultimately intended to become an online reading experience, extending the relevance of Harry Potter to new generations of readers, while still appealing to existing fans.

It’s a pretty inspired concept. Of course, Rowling with her riches and business partners is the kind of author with the kind of clout you’d need to make something like this happen.

The real game changer among all this, however, despite the partnership comment above, is that the ebooks will be essentially self-published. Her publishers, Bloomsbury, Scholastic, etc., don’t own the eletronic rights – and I bet they’re really happy about that. So Rowling is planning to make the ebooks available directly through Pottmore. Of course, when Rowling self-publishes, she’s has a team of people behind her and her own company on the case, so it’s not like she sits there on her own and uploads files to Amazon. But the key here is the lack of a third-party publisher.

The Kindle will accept epub format ebooks soon and the announcement that the Harry Potter ebooks will be available from October seems to fit in with that, so it’s likely the books will be in epub. That certainly does seem to be the prominent format and, aside from Amazon’s mobi format, has been the industry leader all along. Once the Kindle accepts epub too, we have the first stage of industry standardisation and that’s a good thing for all of us. Perhaps we have Rowling to thank in part for forcing that change – who knows who talked to who while this was getting off the ground.

Authors leveraging their existing print success to manage their own ebook releases is nothing new – just see J A Konrath’s example for one. But nothing on this scale has happened before and we can see things shifting a little more on the axis. I’ve said it before – we’re living in exciting times in writing and publishing and the ride ain’t over yet. I wonder how many kids will get an ereader with a set of Harry Potter books on board for Xmas this year? This will be a big step in mainstreaming ereaders, which are becoming more and more mainstream anyway. On a recent flight to Melbourne I noticed several people reading from Kindles and Sony Readers while waiting for my plane.

The kind of cross-media storytelling and promotion which Pottermore represents is certainly not new, but we’ve seen nothing on this scale before. Just the official announcement video is better than any book trailer a lowly author like myself could hope for. I wonder where we go from here?

Here’s the official release video from Rowling herself:

And here’s the Pottermore site.

Interesting times indeed. What do you think? Is this a good thing or not? Where do things go from here?

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It’s a genesis story and tells us how the whole X-Men thing began. In essence, it’s really a Magneto story, focussing more on what made Erik Lehnsherr into Magneto than anything else, but it manages to be so much more than that. It touches on how the mutants are the children of the nuclear age and not an aberration but the evolution of humanity, thereby setting the stage for the stand-off between humans and mutants that we’ve seen in the other films.

Charles Xavier, excellently played by James McAvoy, discovers Raven (Mystique), played by Jennifer Lawrence, when they’re children. They realise they’re not alone in their weirdness and thus begins Xavier’s interest in genetics which leads him to become a professor. He’s a genius and a telepath and, through a few connections with the CIA, begins to gather other mutants together. He shows them they’re not alone and gives them a safe place and a purpose. I’m deliberately skipping a MASSIVE chunk of the story here, as it’s far better experienced through the film.

Alongside this story we see Erik Lehnsherr, forced through horrible methods by Kevin Bacon’s Sebastian Shaw, to embrace his own mutant powers, and there the seed of his genesis is planted. It turns out that Shaw is up to no good in a massive way and is trying to trigger a nuclear war. In this way the film manages to weave the plot of the mutants into the real world history of the Cuban missile crisis and it does a superb job of that. If you’re a serious history buff you might have trouble with some of the liberties taken with events surrounding the Cuban missile crisis. To this I would point out that there aren’t really mutant people with incredible super powers, so if you can suspend that disbelief and accept a young man who flies by screaming at the ground, you can let a bit of alternate history go.

The film is set in 1962 and the faith to the era and environment is really well done. The performances are top notch. I’ve already mentioned that James McAvoy was excellent as Xavier. Other stand-outs are Jennifer Lawrence as Mystique and Nicholas Hoult as Hank McCoy/Beast. Kevin Bacon is excellent as Shaw and creates in that character a very convincing bad guy. But the entire film is stolen by Michael Fassbender as Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto. His performance is true brilliance.

The film largely focusses on Magneto’s genesis, and an integral part of that is the friendship between Xavier and Lehnsherr and how that grows and then fractures. The film does a great job of exploring that dynamic. Some of the best scenes in the film are conversations between Xavier and Magneto, which is some going for an action flick.

The political backdrop of the missile crisis provides an excellent crucible for the bigger issues explored by this film. Always the X-Men have been about accepting difference and this film is no exception. This is particularly well explored with the relationship between Mystique and Beast, with her spending all her time trying to conceal her true appearance, while he does all he can to cure his. Eventually, of course, they face the truth of who they are and make decisions based on those realisations. The film manages to get its messages across in entertaining ways, with plenty of humour thrown in and some stellar action sequences. Also, talking of humour, there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo in this one that will have fans nerdgasming all over the place. It’s hilarious and brilliant. You’ll know it when you see it.

So there’s new life in the X-Men franchise and this is perhaps the best X-Men film yet. Well worth your time and money. I already want to see it again.

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But the Pirates movies have suffered something in the way of diminishing returns with each new release. The first one was excellent and the next two, while good fun, very clever with their special effects and excellent fantasy escapism, didn’t really hit that high again. This installent, however, did. I don’t necessarily want to suggest it’s the best of the lot, as a several people I know have said, but it’s definitely a return to form.

Essentially, Captain Jack Sparrow meets up with an old lover, Angelica, played by Penelope Cruz, and she has a plan to find the Fountain Of Youth. There’s a Spanish fleet also looking for it, and King George has got Captain Barbossa to turn over an honest leaf and captain a ship to find the Fountain for Britain. Turns out that Angelica is actually on board ship with Blackbeard, the pirate that even pirates fear, and the whole thing gets very complicated. But therein lies one of the strengths of the film. The plot is complex and characters have agendas other than those we initially believe and so on. It’s not so complicated that we can’t keep up, but it’s not simplistic either. It’s a good, convoluted story, and you all know how I appreciate some good storytelling. There are some issues that crop up. A few times there are characters who do things completely out of character, or purely for convenience. There are some twists that don’t really make sense and are obviously there to shoe horn the next twist or create a set piece that’s expected in the franchise. But these are all small niggles in an otherwise good yarn.

The performances are excellent as always, especially Ian McShane as Blackbeard. And, on a side note, I want Blackbeard’s coat. I mean, I really want it. If you’re reading this and you know how to get it, I want to know! Geoffrey Rush is excellent as always playing Barbossa, Cruz is good as Angelica, Depp is perfect as Captain Jack Sparrow and Keith Richards has a brief cameo return as Jack’s dad.

The story comes from Tim Powers’ 1987 novel, On Stranger Tides, with the Pirates Of The Caribbean characters woven in. There are zombies, though they are a bit unexplained in the film, other than being the voodoo kind, and turned that way because they obey better and Blackbeard likes his crew to be easily controlled. There are mermaids, and part of the problem the characters face is getting a mermaid’s tear to make use of the Fountain Of Youth. This led to the best scene in the film for me – Sparrow, Blackbeard, et al travel to Whitecap Bay, famous for being the kind of place from which people never return. This is where they’ll find mermaids and they set a longboat of crew out as bait, with a spotlight from land lighting the water, to attract the mermaids. The mermaids themselves are the nasty siren kind, that start off all lovely and desirable, then grab you and eat your face off. Which is, of course, the best kind of mermaid. The scene with the sailors in the long boat as bait and the first appearance of the mermaids is a proper creepy bit of film-making and I thoroughly enjoyed it.

To be honest, I thoroughly enjoyed the whole film. The required Jack Sparrow escape scene at the start was contrived and not very well done, some of the plot was a bit too convenient, some people did mystifying things, but on the whole it was a clever and creepy yarn, well told and well played, with the expected level of special effects eye candy. And a nice line in drumming as part of the score, which I noticed on a few occaions. If you like your pirates and your supernatural adventures, you’ll like this.

Seriously, I want this coat. Badly. Get it for me.

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Of course, your mileage may vary. I’ve even come across people that don’t like ASOIAF at all. I can only imagine they also hate puppies. There are some very weird folk out there. Others may think that ASOIAF is good, but they have other favourites. Regardless, the majority view is that it’s brilliant. The majority are right.

The HBO television adaptation is a no-expense-spared homage to the books. After three episodes it’s clear they’re not cutting corners and I’m enjoying seeing a visual interpretation of the books more than I thought I might. They’ve got some details wrong, they’re missing stuff here and there, but it’s an adaptation, not a facsimile. But it’s not a patch on the books.

Rarely is the TV or film version of a story better than the written one. You can draw some examples where the film is better, the most obvious to me being Blade Runner, the greatest film of all time. It’s based on the Philip K Dick novel, Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep. I prefer the movie to the book, but they’re actually vastly different things. The influence and inspiration is obvious, but Ridley Scott did very different things with the film than PKD did with the book.

Even so, to return to ASOIAF, a ten episode television adaptation of an 800 page novel should move at a pace and be enthralling and intense. It should grip the viewer, make us desperate to see the next part. Certainly it should have a faster pace than a novel that could prop up a table with three legs. Now while the television series is brilliant, it’s not as compelling as the book for me. And I couldn’t figure out why.

I know the story, so reading the book was new while watching the show isn’t. That’s certainly part of it. No matter how detailed and carefully made the television show is, it can’t possibly contain the detail and characterisation of the book. And here we start to see the issue at hand. Martin’s massive story – and it does almost redefine the term epic – is not one of those long, meandering big fat fantasies. It’s a fast, powerful big fat fantasy. And it’s like that because of the method Martin employs in his storytelling.

It’s episodic, just like a ten part television series. Except each part is very short. In ASOIAF every chapter is titled with a character name. We know immediately that the chapter in question is going to be told from the point of view (POV) of that character. By doing this Martin manages to tell his story with a huge cast of characters. Every POV chapter contains numerous other players, all important to the plot. But Martin is able to focus each of those sections through the eyes of the chapter character in question. We then quickly develop favourites – Tyrion, Jaime, Brienne, Arya to name a few of mine – and we desperately want to get to the next chapter told through their eyes.

This turns an 800 page novel into a huge collection of 10 page (or so) interlinked short stories. And Martin writes them that way. Each chapter is almost self-contained, like a good short story, while being an integral part of the whole.

I love short stories. I love reading them and I love writing them. I particularly like selling them. And most other people like short stories too. Even people that don’t really think they like short stories, because they want a bigger narrative with less left untold, can still appreciate a good short yarn. Just some people read very few of them and prefer to immerse themselves in a novel with their reading time. George R R Martin makes ASOIAF so compelling because he gives us that massive, epic story, told in hundreds of short stories. Faster and more intense than episodes of a television show. Deeper and more detailed than a television show could ever be. He tells stories within stories and takes us on a journey of intrigue and politics that would bore us silly in an historical textbook. And he does it with tight, episodic storytelling.

Because we switch POV with every chapter, the story never slows down. We know that once this chapter ends, we’re going somewhere else. Sometimes Martin cheats – for example, he’ll have a Jaime chapter and Cersei will be involved. Then he’ll immediately follow it with a Cersei chapter, then maybe another Jaime one. He’s just managed to stay in one place for three chapters with only two POV changes between two characters. Clever stuff. But he very rarely does that.

By having a key character POV in each of his theatres of action, we keep track of what’s going on. We might not remember all the names of all the players, especially when there’s a long gap between visits to certain characters or scenarios, but that lynchpin character holds us in place and we can follow along. And each of those chapters is a little self-contained slice of a far, far bigger tale. You can tell by the way the chapters start. I’ll give a few random examples from the first book in the series:

“It’s the Hand’s tourney that’s they cause of all the trouble, my lords,” the Commander of the City Watch complained to the king’s council.

Through the high narrow windows of the Red Keep’s cavernous throne room, the light of sunset spilled across the floor, laying dark red stripes upon the walls where the heads of dragons had once hung.

The Karstarks came in on a cold windy morning, bringing three hundred horsemen and near two thousand foot from their castle at Karhold.

Each of those is quite random – I just leafed through A Game Of Thrones and picked the opening line of three different chapters. Two of them are even the same character POV. But any one of those sentences could be the start of a novel or a short story. There’s no reference to the previous chapter because we’ve shifted from those events to somewhere new. There’s no presupposition of place or situation until we’re several paragraphs in and discover where we are and what thread we’re picking up. And even then, it could be hours, days or weeks since we were last in the company of this particular POV character.

Any good book will keep you turning the pages, even a massive, fat fantasy in multiple volumes. But no one does it so well or so consistently as Martin does in ASOIAF.

Honestly, Martin is a genius, a proven master with what he’s achieved with ASOIAF. The next volume is due out in July and I believe there are two more volumes after that slated to wrap up the whole thing. The TV show is going to have one series for each volume. So Martin had better keep writing so the actors don’t outgrow the story before he’s finished. Regardless, whatever he does, the books will always be more powerful and more compelling than the television series. And not just because we get more in the books – more characters, more detail, more history – but because of the way Martin has chosen to tell that story. The method that so often had me bleary of a morning because the night before I sat there reading saying, “Oh, just one chapter before bed.” Then it was another Tyrion chapter. Then an Arya chapter. And then… and then…

There’s a lot that makes Martin’s masterpiece so good, but it’s the way he tells the story that makes it so addictive.

What do you think? Is this why you love it too? Or why you hate it?

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But it’s way better than that.

I’m going to review this film with as little spoilerage as possible, but it’s one of those films that is hard to explain without some exposition. To be honest, if I wanted to give nothing away, that first paragraph would be all I could post! I’ll describe the overall premise very briefly here and then go on to a review after the next picture. I really won’t give too much away anywhere here, but if you want to know nothing about this film, skip to the other side of the next image.

The basic premise is this: When someone dies their brain retains a latent glow of information, like a light bulb filament after you turn it off. That “glow” lasts for eight minutes. A certain compatible brain type, with the help of Dr Rutledge’s incredible science, employing quantum mechanics and some stuff or something and a clever machine, allows this military team to send a person back into the source code – essentially a program generated by the latent brain image of the dead. But every time a person goes back, they only have that eight minute window to work in.

Clear? No, not really. Turns out that Jake Gyllenhaal’s character, Captain Colter Stevens, is an air force captain and he’s in the machine, being sent back into the source code memory of a victim of a terrorist attack. A train was blown up on its way to Chicago and more attacks are imminent. If Stevens and the team can go back into the source code often enough for him to find the bomber and/or any information about the bomb, the military could conceiveably prevent the next attacks by catching the people responsible. They can’t do anything about what has already happened, because it’s just a program, just Source Code, but they can learn things to act on future attacks.

Source Code is a slick, classy movie. It’s directed by Duncan Jones, the man who brought us Moon, so you know it’s in good hands, and written by Ben Ripley. The performances are all excellent, particularly Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, who plays Christina Warren, and Vera Farmiga, who plays Colleen Goodwin. I thought Goodwin was a particularly powerful character.

The science in this sci-fi thriller is very much on the lite side. If you read the paragraphs above you’ll realise that it’s not clearly defined. I wasn’t vague about it because I wasn’t paying attention. I was vague because the film is vague on the science. Something about quantumm mechanics, a clever kind of machine thing and a smarmy, self-important doctor. But the science isn’t really the relevant part. If you want that properly explained, you’ll be diappointed. If you have a solid grasp on quantum mechanics and the like, you’ll probably cringe at the liberties this film takes with those ideas. But I didn’t let that bother me. It’s a strong action thriller and should be enjoyed as such. The premise and development of that idea are really well done and the film is powerful for its focus on subjects like fate, duty and the meaning of life.

This film is in a similar vein to Inception and I’m really pleased to see these films being made. There’s a distinct return, most evident in Source Code and Inception recently, to intelligent, challenging storytelling. In Source Code they play with time (but it’s not really time travel) and the whole plot plays with your mind as you try to unravel it along with the characters. I did see most of the little twists coming and I imagine most people with even a simple familiarity with sci-fi would anticipate them too. But none of them were forced and they all worked well.

Immediately on leaving the theatre my friend and I began chattering in earnest about the ending and how it happened. The film made us think while we watched and kept us thinking. We figured out a timeline that seemed contradictory but actually isn’t and is really very clever (quantum mechanic liberties aside). Source Code is a mind-bender. It’ll keep people interested long after the film is finished and won’t just leave people with the old adage, “Well, it looked good. Amazing effects!” Sure, the effects were really good and very convincing, but you know what? They were only used to advance the story. Imagine that! There was me thinking Hollywood had forgotten about that.

The film takes its ideas from a number of sources. I mentioned earlier that it has a distinct Groundhog Day feel to it. It also has clear influence from a number of other sources, including most notably the premise of Quantum Leap. As an aside, there’s a clever Scott Bakula cameo (he played the main character in Quantum Leap). Don’t cheat, but I bet you a hundred bucks* you don’t spot his cameo appearance. Watch the credits afterwards to get the answer.

* Not a real bet. I don’t have a hundred bucks!

This is a film that’s well worth your time and money. It’s clever, brilliantly shot and constructed, neatly avoiding a lot of potential paradoxes even if it is light on the science, and exciting from start to finish. It grips just as a thriller should and will challenge your thinking all the way through. As a last note, when you do watch this film, spare a thought for poor old Sean Fentress. When you’ve seen the film, take a minute to think about that and you’ll see what I mean.

Have you seen it? What did you think? Did the potential problems with the science bother you? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

(NB: Source Code opens nationally (Australia) on 5th May 2011)

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