For fans of independent films, now might be the time to feel vindicated. The transition from the realm of indie to the studio system isn’t a new concept by any means, but in the last several years cutting one’s teeth on the festival circuit has become very lucrative for some directors. Gareth Edwards went from making the low-budget Monsters in 2010 to helming the Godzilla reboot 4 years later (and in doing so went from a 6-figure budget to a 9-figure one); Marc Webb leapt from the twee (500) Days of Summer to taking over Sony’s Spider-Man reboot The Amazing Spider-Man; James Gunn went from R-rated genre fare to handling Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy; Rian Johnson, who already made a big leap from Brick to Looper, launched into the stratosphere when he was picked to direct the 8^th episode of Star Wars; and most recently, Safety Not Guaranteed’s Colin Trevorrow followed up his début with none other than Jurassic World. The glamour of Hollywood is merging with the not so glamorous world of DIY filmmaking, and it’s clearly working out for both the directors and the studios.

It’s natural to wonder how the influx of relatively new directors from festivals like Sundance or SXSW might change the blandness of Hollywood tentpoles, but it might be better to start asking about the other side of this equation. What does this mean for independent films, and will it change the way we perceive indies? Independent films don’t have an industry as vast or profitable as the studios, which means that the indie “system” is much more malleable and, therefore, easier to change.

And it’s evident that, despite the financial success of films like Jurassic World and Godzilla, artistic success is hard to find in this new trend. The boundaries between mainstream and independent have been slowly merging together, but the entire idea of indie has been about separating from the mainstream, and providing an alternative to films designed by committee. What’s happening now is a slow, disparaging shift in what indie means, and an increase in power and control for Hollywood. Indie directors aren’t infiltrating the system; they’re being devoured by it.

Jurassic World and Godzilla

That hasn’t always been the case. The early ’90s saw the success stories of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and Kevin Smith. For those three filmmakers, their situation was the ideal. Rather than adapt themselves to the status quo, they were able to apply their distinct styles on a bigger scale. But the film industry is a different beast today. Tarantino, Rodriguez and Smith directed their own original stories and didn’t work with a massive budget. Today, directors are getting scooped up to take over other people’s properties, and the budgets go well past 100 million. It’s nice to think that a certain filmmaker’s unique or irreverent style might successfully port over to the sequel/prequel/reboot/adaptation/etc. blockbuster, but it’s not likely. Investors would be insane to hand over that amount of cash to someone who’s only worked with a small fraction of that money.

All someone has to do is watch what’s been released so far to see how much these director’s distinct qualities from their earlier work(s) have been drowned out by the wants and needs of those truly running the show. Watch Godzilla, or James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, and it’s like playing a game of “Where’s Waldo?” with directorial trademarks. Gunn may have been able to cast Michael Rooker in a supporting role—a part that could have gone to anyone and no one would have blinked—but Guardians follows a very clear, familiar and formulaic path, one that also helped Marvel continue building the overall story for their massively successful franchise. It didn’t come as a huge surprise when rumours started that Edgar Wright, one of the best genre filmmakers working today, bailed on Ant-Man because Marvel wanted a Marvel movie, not an Edgar Wright movie.

So this brings me back to the first question I asked: What does this mean for independent films? What this new trend has done is turn film festivals like Sundance and SXSW—places designed to celebrate and promote distinct, independent voices—into training grounds for the next studio workman (with extra emphasis on man, as Jessica Ritchey points out). Now, indie features act as showreels or auditions, with people speculating over which directors will get hurled into the maw of the next big-budget property. And by putting the emphasis on this, it pushes the truly independent American filmmakers working today—the Andrew Bujalskis, the Josephine Deckers, the Rick Alversons, the Alex Ross Perrys, the Sean Bakers, the Nathan Silvers, and the Matthew Porterfields, to name a few—even further into the fringe. People look at the trajectories of people like Trevorrow, Edwards, Johnson, Webb, Gunn and others as a sign of indie taking over the mainstream, but it’s more like the mainstream assimilating the indie universe. The pockets of Hollywood studios may be getting bigger, but the opportunity for discovering and supporting groundbreaking new talents appears to be getting smaller with every year.

Source Code is the sophomore feature of director Duncan Jones. It borrows the sci-fi aspect of his first film, Moon, and throws in a puzzle plot in this techno-thriller. The film was well-crafted, with only a slight plot-hole near the end, about a man who is in the same 8 minute time-loop trying to figure out who planted a bomb on a train. If The Matrix and Groundhog Day had a baby, Source Code would be it.

The film jumps right in with Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) waking up on a train, clearly confused by his surroundings. The woman (Michelle Monaghan) sitting across from him is in mid conversation with him. Adding to the confusion she insists that she knows him and repeatedly calls him Sean. In a desperate move to figure out what is going on, he goes to the bathroom only to find a face in the mirror that is not his, but rather Sean’s.

The opening 8 minutes of the film is one of the most intriguing first 8 minutes of recent film memory. The viewer is in the same boat, or in this case train, as the main character. We have no clue who Sean is, why he is all of a sudden on a train or who the women sitting across from him is. Well played.

As soon as Colter’s time on the train hits 8 minutes, the bomb goes off and the train explodes into flames. He awakes strapped inside some kind of metal capsule in a secret U.S. military experiment. In front of him are computer screens with a women named Colleen Goodwin (Vera Farmiga) instruction him what to do.

Goodwin expresses how time is not on their side for this experiment but she does finally explain what exactly is going on. The commuter train explosion was caused by a bomb placed by someone on the train. Goodwin’s team was able to gain access into the brain of one of the passengers and able to re-create the last 8 minutes of his life before the bomb went off. From that they were able to build a simulation world that consists of those 8 minutes, they call it Source Code. It has The Matrix similarities abound, the most obvious is the alternate-simulation-world but also Goodwin basically being “the operator”.

His mission is to go back for the 8 minutes to try to locate the bomb and figure out who planted it. With this information they can capture the bomber to prevent an even larger attack that could destroy Chicago. Colter can go back multiple times but still only has the same time limit of 8 minutes. So needs to learn from each visit, Groundhog Day style, piecing the puzzle together.

A human element of emotions comes into play as Colter begins to form a relationship with some of the other passengers, most notably Christina, who we meet at the beginning of each new initialization of Source Code. Which means his mission just got expanded.

Just like in his first film, Moon, Duncan Jones relies heavily on one central character to do most of the heavy lifting. But to be fair, Gyllenhaal had a little more help than Sam Rockwell did. Gyllenhaal was a fantastic choice, he was solid in his role. Monaghan was maybe a little more replaceable, but that was more because of her role than her performance. Farmiga made a role that would normally be overlooked and played it very well.

The first two acts of Source Code far surpassed the relatively weak third act. The ending was safe and too Hollywood friendly, which is a bit of a shame because I do not think it needed to be. For the most part, the film remains a fast paced thriller with at least one bone-chilling turn-of-event scene. It is not as mind blowing as Inception, but that does not mean it is not worth a watch or two.

Moon is an imaginative space sci-fi thriller that won’t ever have anything more than a cult following. Which is really too bad because it deserves a little more credit than that. A little more.

Moon starts off with Sam Rockwell playing an astronaut, Sam Bell, who is working on a 3 year mining contract on the moon. The company he works for is gathering resources from the moon that provides Earth with valuable power resources. Sam is there alone with only his computer named GERTY whose voice is eerily done by Kevin Spacey.

It would be impossible to not compare this film with Stanley Kubrick’s classic, 2001: A Space Odyssey. The computer GERTY is very familiar to that of the intelligent computer HAL which is found in Kubrick’s film. There is also a scene near the beginning that has a shot of the earth with classical music in the background, which was perhaps director Duncan Jones’s not so subtle way of showing respect for 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I have to give Rockwell credit in that he basically had no human supporting actor throughout the entire movie, in that sense it’s sort of similar to Tom Hank’s performance in Cast Away. However, there were a few times in Moon where I thought the acting got a little awkward which is hard to explain without spoiling the movie.

It’s a beautifully depressing independent film that you don’t need to be a regular fan of the genre to enjoy, but you will have to be in the right mood to fully appreciate it.