Unstoppable

  

     The movie is inspired by the true events that took place on March 15, 2001 in Toledo, Ohio. In which a locomotive left a railyard without an engineer and ran through three counties and sixty-six miles before it was stopped. 'Unstoppable' takes place in modern day Pennsylvania, where one morning during what should have been a routine track switch in a railyard. A bumbling and lazy mechanic decides to leave the cab and manually switch a track that wasn't thrown, before he can get back in to the cab, the train accidentally drops into drive and is unable to catch up to the train on foot. Now with a runaway train on her hands dispatcher Connie (Rosario Dawson) must find someway to get runway train 777 stopped before a major incident. Way down on the opposite end of the main-line, Frank Barnes (Denzel Washington) and Will Colson (Chris Pine) have started the day with picking up their load of cars. What they are unaware of, is that in the end after all other measures have failed, it will be up to these two (the old railroader of 28 years and the newbie hotshot) to bring their knowledge together and put their lives and their locomotive on the line to stop the runaway 777, before it reaches an elevated 'S' turn and derails into a heavily populated town.
     This is why I still go to the movies, to see this kind of action movie on the big screen. The best thing, it was a train movie not involving a terrorist plot and the cargo not a full train of nuclear chemicals, but, a few cars of a highly combustable materal used in glue production. So, it was a believable bomb on rails at least.  It also was not in 3D! It kept paced and never really dragged at any point. Of course there are some diviations from the original true story, such as placing fuel holding tanks under the elevated 'S' curve and changing the chemical to a more hazardous one. However the unmanned train, the efforts to stop it and the final use of a train in reverse to hunt down another train remain true to the original true story. Here's a piece on the actual event (http://kohlin.com/CSX8888/z-final-report.htm). So of course it was made more dramatic and climatic for the movie, but, if it was all real it would be a documentary not an action movie. Movies aren't there to educate or re-tell history but to provide a couple hours entertainment and if they want to use a real story as a basis for a film, rather than re-make another or use a tired plot thats fine by me. Since it's still in theaters and not many may of heard of it, I figured I'd throw the trailer on t the end of this posting. As usual Tony Scott does some really nice directing and choice of shots in creating a different feel on chase scenes. Instead of using choppy editing and blurring the frames to give the sense of speed, he utlizes the camera in different angles to give that sense of speed.