SPOILERS SPOILERS SERIOUS SPOILERS SPOILERS
i.e. did he just hijack poor Sean's body? What happened to the teacher? The teacher is the guy Christina fell for. It makes it kinda creepy that you could be just living your life somewhere then someone else takes over your body.
I'd just say that--remember,
within the logic of the movie --the teacher, Sean Fentress, Christina, and everyone on the train after the last station--are dead.
After many iterations of their utterly fatal (if sequentially repetitive) deaths, Jake's character, Capt. Colter Stevens, manages to save all these people
except Fentress, but, given the logic of the movie, there is no way he can save Fentress. He
might have even been trying to save Sean when he asked that, after the last 8 minute sequence, he, Colter, be killed--his own previous life was over any way. When Colter-as-Sean had his one last kiss with Christina, should he have felt sad when he found, astonishingly, that he, Colter-as-Sean, was alive in another time line after all? Quite weirdly Christ-as-Buddha selfless if he did!
Also--I'm not so sure Christina
had fallen for the real Sean Fentress
prior to the unwilling posession by the most certainly unwitting Colter Stephens. Rather, I think, Christina seems to have suddenly fallen for this 'new' Sean; in fact, at one early point, half jokingly, half admiringly, she says something like, "Who are you and how have you kidnapped Sean Fentress?" It is the new daring and desperate man that she has been learning to--love? Hard to do that in 8 minutes, I know, but--it's Jake after all, who wouldn't?
There ARE plot-holes galore, but Duncan does attempt to take a real idea from the spookily quantum notion of 'multiple worlds.' The borrowed cell-phone Colter Stephens-as-Sean-Fentress texts to the
other Vera Fermiga character in the multiple world timeline in which the train-explosion-never-happened is telling her that multiple worlds ARE real, and is pretty much explicitly saying that there is another (and another, and another) cocooned, not-quite-yet-dead Colter Stephens who may yet become a butterfly into yet another (and another) timeline.
Is it bad that Colter-as-Sean is hoping that the other (still cocooned, unconscious, utterly wounded and damaged) Colter Stephens-in-the-capsule, the NEXT Colter, will take flight to another timeline/but must take the life of another man (or woman?) like Sean Fentress in the process? Maybe, but--if multiple worlds DO exist, there are an infinite number of Sean Fentresses who died in an infinite number of explosions, and an infinite number of Sean Fentresses who completed his safe journey to Chicago, and an infinite number of Sean Fentresses who lived happily after with an infinite number of Christinas--and an infinite number of Sean Fentresses who struck out because that infinite series of Christinas finally decided all the Seans were wimps (and not the Weakly Interacting Massive Particle type either).
Anyway--I sort of liked the movie. I liked that, unlike most shoot-em up Hollywood movies, Duncan sort of wanted the largest number of people to live. I sort of liked that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretationMany-worlds interpretationFrom Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia