Movie Review: Unstoppable
I have been meaning to watch this movie for some time, mainly because I actually work at the railroad, so when Jan suggested it, I was quite eager.
This is, of course, an impending disaster type of movie. It centers around a fluke set of circumstances which in reality can't happen, but for the sake of the story you just accept that the locomotives do NOT have dead man switches in them.
The story revolves around a fully loaded train in which a switch in the track was incorrectly set, and so the engineer sets the brakes on the engine, jumps off the engine and manually switches the track. Of course, while he is off, the brake slips and the engine starts running before the engineer can get back on board and viola, you have a runaway freight train.
We also have an unlikely pair of heroes who start the movie at odds with each other, but during the crisis become comrades as they use their lone engine in an attempt to connect to the last car of the runaway train and use their engine to slow and stop it before it derails in a city and spills its toxic and explosive cargo all over the suburbs.
A decent picture which aside from some errors, give a good idea of what goes on behind the scenes of a railroad. See it at a matinée, catch it on cable or wait for it to come out on DVD.
This is, of course, an impending disaster type of movie. It centers around a fluke set of circumstances which in reality can't happen, but for the sake of the story you just accept that the locomotives do NOT have dead man switches in them.
The story revolves around a fully loaded train in which a switch in the track was incorrectly set, and so the engineer sets the brakes on the engine, jumps off the engine and manually switches the track. Of course, while he is off, the brake slips and the engine starts running before the engineer can get back on board and viola, you have a runaway freight train.
We also have an unlikely pair of heroes who start the movie at odds with each other, but during the crisis become comrades as they use their lone engine in an attempt to connect to the last car of the runaway train and use their engine to slow and stop it before it derails in a city and spills its toxic and explosive cargo all over the suburbs.
A decent picture which aside from some errors, give a good idea of what goes on behind the scenes of a railroad. See it at a matinée, catch it on cable or wait for it to come out on DVD.