Action movies come and go like seashells caught in the washing tides of a sandy beach. No one could have predicted that 2010’s Unstoppable would become the textbook example for the genre and the epitaph of an expert filmmaker. Like its premise of a runaway train increasing in speed to threaten a whole city, so to will fans’ enjoyment increase as they come to recognize its meticulous achievements. It epitomizes the purest examples of every part of film craft. Story, character, theme, are all given a sterling treatment in Unstoppable. For that, it has aged wonderfully as a movie. It is undoubtedly a masterclass of filmmaking.
Director Tony Scott was quick to rebound from his previous box office defeat, 2009’s The Taking of Pelham 123, by diving into the challenging production of Unstoppable. The movie is based on a real-life event that took place in 2001. The two heroes of that incident were closely involved in the making of Unstoppable, as insisted by Tony Scott himself. The premise of the movie is as simple as it gets: a train carrying highly explosive and contaminant material slips out of human control and turns into a missile aimed at a city with hundreds of thousands of innocent citizens. The only two people who can stop it are a rookie conductor and veteran engineer, played by Chris Pine and Denzel Washington, respectively. Despite seeming like nothing more than base components, Unstoppable grossed $167.8 million on a budget of $100 million, and was nominated for an Oscar for Best Sound Editing at the 83rd Academy Awards.
It is a common screenwriting technique to create characters who are the “blankiest blank in the blank.” Such as the greatest swordsman in the kingdom, or the fastest gunslinger in the west. Unstoppable makes a point of showing that their characters fit this mold perfectly. Chris Pine plays the rookiest rookie of all conductors in the train yard, paired with Denzel Washington’s wisest old-timer of all the veterans. Ethan Suplee and T.J. Miller are perfectly cast as the movie’s misanthropes, Dewey and Gilleece. These two extraordinarily dumb and incompetent characters are the cause of the whole disaster. They have no redeeming qualities save for their simple naivety. The two lowest guys create the problem for the two best guys to solve.
Rosario Dawson’s yardmaster counterpoints Kevin Dunn’s vice-president of train operations. She is the field experienced, grassroots, no-nonsense practical thinker versus the boardroom suit-and-tie spreadsheet micromanager. True to cinematic formula, the corporate boss ignores the boots on the ground’s advice to save the company’s image (and profit margin), resulting in a half-baked solution ending with the needless death of a train conductor.
Pine and Washington are intentionally designed to be competing facets of the blue-collar economic experience. Pine represents the newer, younger union workers, or “yellow vests,” aggressively replacing the older near-pension veterans. They lay off the old-timers and cut their pensions, then hire the new guys with way less pay all so that the company can save money – again, true to formula. It sets up the familiar theme of economic hardship caused by the cold corporate bottom line. Pine and Washington are two aspects of the everyman experience and thus relatable and well-rounded. They did not choose to be heroes but stepped up when “the world” needed them. They put their life on the line for family, for their coworkers, and for the innocent people the train threatens.
Various interactions and scenarios for the two also portray a clash of generation. The new kid makes sloppy mistakes while the veteran successfully acts on intuition and experience. Like a buddy cop movie, the two leads start off opposed, realize how their differences complement one another, and then join to save the day. Where Pine incorrectly estimates the length of their train in a dangerous near collision, Washington corrects it. Where Washington cannot physically leap between two train cars, Pine jumps from a pickup truck at full speed. The generational conflict resolves in a merger of simpatico gain.
The film’s highlight is its treatment of the runaway train. Ordinary disaster flicks treat the impending doom merely as a ticking bomb, which Unstoppable unabashedly does. However, the movie also gives the “disaster” personality. The train has character, with its own temperament and voice. In the film it is known as Triple Seven, but it was called “the beast” on set. Whenever the beast is on screen there is this sound of a deep guttural, metal, roar. It instantly signals fear and horror. The beast speaks!
The train is essentially a cinematic monster like Michael Myers or Dracula. It is Jaws on train tracks. Like horror monsters, the beast claims victims. First, a horse trailer caught in a rail crossing. Then it viciously derails and kills a train conductor who got in its way. It knocks unconscious a Marine who swung down from a helicopter to try and mount the train. The beast would have none of it.
Like all movie monsters, it was created by the folly of man (aforementioned misanthropes and corporation), the first attempt to stop it is fruitless and only antagonizes it more. Finally, every good movie monster must be destroyed by the simplest of things. In this case, it was a cowboy driving a pickup truck who came to the rescue.
Speaking of said cowboy, Ned is the quintessential example of a plot runner. The plot runner’s purpose in a script is to save the narrative when the writer is trying to solve the conclusion. It is a story technique. It is something the audience is not supposed to notice at first, catch a whiff of at second, and then realize it was crucial by the end. Ned is introduced incidentally in act one at a diner. He is seen chasing down the train as part of the environment in act two, and he becomes essential to resolving the plot in act three, as he collects Chris Pine from the rear of the train to race him up to the driver’s cabin.
Unstoppable also sets the stakes of the movie in truly clear ways. It states, if a small thing were to go wrong with the speed or proximity of the train, a bus full of kids will die, or, the two main heroes will die. If a major thing were to go wrong with the derailment, hundreds of thousands of people in a city will die in a terrible fiery explosion. It grips the audience in the highest heights of all action stakes. At every tension level, there is a dire conflict, scaling from the personal to the municipal.
Additionally, it skillfully sets up and then pays off several elements of the story. First, it threatens how bad the derailment of Triple Seven could be by showing the derailment of another train. When it comes time to witness the potential city disaster, the audience knows how much worse it could be if the heroes fail. Second, it sets up the action Chris Pine’s character takes in the end of the film as he first has to jump between carts at the rear of the train and nearly falls off. The car second to last is punctured and cereal sprays out into Chris Pine’s face, knocking him off and severely injuring his foot in the process. This sequence is called the Grain Storm.
Later, at the very end, he has to jump off the pickup truck onto the cabin to take control of the train. The audience knows there is a real danger to that action because they saw what happened to him earlier. They worry that he might not make it this time and are elated when he just barely catches the door handle. The tension is layered early and spent later to the satisfaction of the spectators.
Tony Scott’s final film is a masterclass of filmmaking. Critics and viewers could argue, however, that Unstoppable traces the by-the-numbers formula too closely. The fact that it is the best of its class still means that it follows the parameters of a tried-and-true category, a well-trod path. This might decrease repeat viewings for the audience. Since everyone has seen an action movie before, watching this one is not too different. It only excels by taking the familiar concepts and tropes of the action genre and exerting them to their maximum tension and representation. Like stretching an elastic to its near breaking point. That is what Unstoppable does for action movies.
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