Movies
Motion Sickness

ONLY DIRECTOR Tony Scott would het up a runaway-train movie, a subject het up enough on its own. In Unstoppable, an old dog (Denzel Washington) and a young pup (Chris Pine) race a single engine to catch up with an unmanned train heading for catastrophe.
The dialogue by Mark Bomback is like action-movie catechism.
Q: How much is the train worth?
A: "$100 million!" Q: How much does it weigh? A: "Ten million pounds!"
Q: What's is the nature of its cargo? A: "Molten phenol! Very toxic, highly combustible!" Q: To what can it be likened? "A missile the size of the Chrysler building!"
At 70 miles an hour, the train heads to a precarious S-curve over some gas tanks. News helicopters buzz around the runaway train, providing an action-movie Greek chorus. Computer animation shows us what will happen when the trains meet—done in the now-beloved Taiwanese-newscast style.
Scott crowds the location changes with captions, including my new all-time favorite: "Zinc Plant, Southern Pennsylvania." Pennsylvania in the full Amazonian green-hell of summer would be a perfect background for a hellbound train, but this is forlorn, waning fall: the digital dying, as always in cyan and orange, makes Washington's features disappear in the duotone murk. Are they bringing back the days of two-strip Technicolor? The whites are completely shot because of this technique; in two-shots, the trains speed past a cemetery full of baby-blue tombstones.
Computer animation allows the bad train to do things real trains can't ordinarily do: dance sideways on the rails like the circus train in Dumbo, for instance. This method impedes the free enjoyment of the heavy-machinery porn, something Scott usually does very well.
Instead of lingering over the big, heavy greasy surfaces to get the men in the audience's irises dilated, Scott tries torn-from-yesterday's-war-correspondent shots. He's a promiscuous refocusser.
As the boss lady in the control tower, Rosario Dawson arrives bearing a stack of donut boxes—the delectable carrying the delicious. She utters some line like, "I brought a box of donuts for the kids." The lens shifts to emphasis this instant. Crisis!: Will there be enough donuts for everyone?
In the rooms where the experts look at the maps and telephone each other, Scott repeats one shot a hundred times, panning the camera as it is dollied, to induce appropriate thematic motion sickness.
Every Scott film is heavy on the exclamation points, but this one is as worn out as America's rail infrastructure. As per Andrey Konchalovskiy's Runaway Train (1985), such a speeding monster ought to have a philosophical purpose, something more interesting, that is, than bringing together two diametrically opposed railway workers together and making them learn to appreciate their families. Hell, you could do that on a scenic pufferbelly ride. Q: How does Washington's character manifest his negligent parenting? A: First, by forgetting one daughter's birthday. Second, by letting both daughters waitress at Hooters. (Scott had to get the skin in there somehow.)
Isn't this train—a glowering locomotive bearing the numbers "777"— a symbol of something? Eco-catastrophe? Corporate malfeasance by a thinly veiled version of CSX? There was more of that in Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections. There's a plot point about layoffs, and we're supposed to think of the head executive in the film (Kevin Dunn) as an idiot who only cares about profit, although he does engineer a pretty entertaining rescue, yo-yoing a former Marine ("Just back from Afghanistan!") from a helicopter onto the deck.
The moment compares favorably with the finale, as seen in the previews: a hero "actually running on top of the train cars!" exclaiming a newscaster, as if this hadn't been a feat performed sometime before in the history of cinema.
The audience gets calmer as the editing gets more furious, and the film never goes over the top where it belongs. Like Scott, Washington is there to repeat things. His particular gift in an action movie is to Gertrude Stein it: "There's only one rule, and one rule only," he tells young pup Pine. He should be telling us what happens to those who break that one rule, whatever that rule was: "And he was found in the wreck with his hand upon the throttle, scalded to death by the steam, poor boy."
PG-13