Trains are perfect vehicles for motion pictures. They're big enough that you can set an entire movie on them, but they're sleek enough that you still get the excitement of seeing them in motion, unlike, say, a cruise ship. Plus, they're a ready-made metaphor for all kinds of things: the growing societal divide in Ozu's Tokyo Story (and many other of his films), the encroaching modernization of Once Upon a Time in the West, and good old-fashioned sex, most famously in the ending of North by Northwest.
The train in Unstoppable (spoiler alert: the title is a lie!) isn't really a metaphor for anything except maybe corporate bumbling. I was mostly curious to see the movie because I wanted to know how many variations on "Get that school bus full of preschoolers off the tracks!" there could be before it got old. Only one bus of students is threatened, along with a horse trailer, an errant woodchuck, and all of Stanton, PA. Or at least the part closest to the tracks.
Tony Scott manages to bob and weave his camera over every inch of the train, and he is mostly successful in keeping things visually interesting, considering the movie consists mainly of people yelling at each other over walkie-talkies. I was wondering how you could have an exciting climax where the focus had to be a train slowing down (Back to the Future III solved this problem marvelously by making the goal not stopping the train, but rocketing it into the future), and the film still manages to keep things exciting.
There was one bit that really made me laugh, though. Much of the film is told through newscasters relating events as they unfold (complete with on-the-spot footage that looks suspiciously like it was filmed by Tony Scott), and at one point, the train is in danger of running off a curve with dangerous chemicals on board, causing a massive explosion. As if this news isn't dramatic enough, the news report then shows a computer-generated dramatization of this very event happening. Now, since I can't imagine that the TV station just happens to have a graphic of an exploding train hurtling over a curve on hand, I imagined a scene something like this:
News Director: Phil, get in here, we need an animated graphic of a train flying off a curve and then exploding!
Phil: We just found out about this possiblity ten minutes ago, and in twenty minutes, we'll be able to see the actual event if Denzel Washington and Captain Kirk don't stop that train! I have literally a window of about fifteen minutes in which to create this elaborately animated sequence that we will never be able to use again. Plus, don't you think it's a little insensitive to the families of the men on board who are watching our broadcast?
News Director: Explosions! Violence! Trains! PG-13 Profanities! Now!
It's for ridiculous stuff like this that I watch these ridiculous movies.
No comments:
Post a Comment