This Jake Gyllenhaal Sci-Fi Blockbuster Was Partially Inspired By A True Story

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

The central technology of Duncan Jones' 2011 science-fiction film "Source Code" is pretty complex. The movie is about a super-advanced virtual reality technology— the titular Source Code — that can somehow reach into the past and psychically scan the minds of dead people, recreating their surroundings based on the last 8 minutes of their lives. The army uses this tech to scan the interior of a Chicago train that had been blown up in a terrorist attack a few days before. With so many dead people to draw from, a wholly interactive VR simulation can be created. 

Jake Gyllenhaal plays an army soldier named Captain Stevens who is shunted into the simulation, occupying the body of one of the bombing victims. Captain Stevens is ordered by his superiors to determine the identity of the bomber from this simulation so they can apprehend him and prevent any future attacks. Stevens only has eight minutes before the train explodes. If he fails, he is reshunted back into the simulation and has to try again. Stevens essentially has extra video game lives. 

Stevens, however, is disoriented and riled up. He was never briefed on his mission, and his last memory was being on the battlefield in Afghanistan. When not in the simulation, Stevens is in a dark geodesic room and only communicates with his superior officer (a pre-"Conjuring" Vera Farmiga) via a video screen. Inside the simulation, he can't quite comprehend that the humans he encounters aren't real. He starts to feel that he can save them, even though they are already dead. 

The tech in "Source Code" is wholly fictional, but director Duncan Jones, in a 2011 io9 interview, remarked that the terrorist bomber in the movie was based on a real person that he read about in the news.

"Source Code" is kind of a time-travel thriller because Captain Stevens is essentially sent into the past, reliving the same eight minutes over and over. There are further twists in the story than what is described above, so the VR tech might be a lot more complex than viewers initially think. And the ending includes a twist that many might not see coming. 

The bomber is eventually revealed to be a young man named Frost (Michael Arden) who was able to construct a dirty bomb in his home. It seems that Duncan Jones modeled Frost after "a guy in the Midwest" who built his own breeder reactor in his mother's backyard, which irradiated the whole 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, very scary kid. And I thought that was an interesting idea that you could have someone who was smart enough to be able to build something like that, and his main reason to do it is, 'Well I know how to do it, so I'll do it.' And no sense of whether he should do it or shouldn't do it. I thought that was a very interesting starting point for that character." 

Jones can't remember the man's name, but he was likely alluding to David Hahn, a kid who aimed to build a working breeder reactor in 1994. The case came to light in 1998 after a report in Harper's Magazine, and was covered in depth in a subsequent 2004 book called "The Radioactive Boy Scout." 

David Hahn, for those unfamiliar with the case, lived in Commerce Township, Michigan. He was always interested in radioactivity and engineering and, just for the challenge of it, aimed to build a working breeder reactor using only what he could cull together at age 17. He didn't build the reactor, but he did manage to build an active neutron source. The story goes that he was pulled over by the cops, who found some of the elements he was using in his reactor in his car. He had gathered radioactive elements from everyday household items; it seems that there was americium in common smoke detectors, thorium in camping lanterns (Hahn was an accomplished Boy Scout), and even radium from antique clocks. 

Hahn told the cops directly that the elements were radioactive, which led to the police calling the government. The EPA ended up having to clean up his amateur reactor lab. It turns out that Hahn's experiment was indeed dangerous, producing 1,000 times the amount of ordinary background radiation. Looking up Hahn after the incident reveals the sad life of a disturbed man. His mom committed suicide in 1996, and he joined the military for a few years (he was stationed on the USS Enterprise). He never gave up his dreams of building a nuclear reactor, though, and was busted as recently as 2007 for collecting more americium. He died in 2016 at the age of 39. 

Hahn never built a bomb like the one in "Source Code" and never intended to hurt anyone. Duncan Jones, however, liked the idea of a genius wunderkind building a nuclear reactor without realizing that it might be dangerous. He would love that movie, "The Manhattan Project."