But Scott all but crushes us with the weight of the juggernaut. The photography and sound here are very effective in establishing that a train is an enormously heavy thing, and once in motion wants to continue. Not that those are terms we're thinking of during the action. They employ a kind of logical lateral thinking: The trains can move only in certain ways, but those ways may not be as obvious as we assume. How Scott deals with his "chase" is not for me to reveal here, but although the possibilities of two trains on one track would seem to be limited, he and Bomback are truly ingenious.
Two other films that come to mind are Buster Keaton's "The General" (1926) and Andrei Konchalovsky's " Runaway Train" (1985), which won Oscar nominations for the two men in its locomotive, Jon Voight and Eric Roberts. There are sidings, but getting on to one may not be very simple. Rosario Dawson makes her dispatcher aggressively competent, and the hurtling train of course rumbles beneath everything.Ĭhase scenes involving trains have an unavoidable limit: Trains require tracks and can only go forward or in reverse.
This conflict isn't ramped up for dramatic effect in the screenplay by Mark Bomback, but is allowed to play out as naturally as it can, under the circumstances. This tightly paced South Korean action film (which has been favourably compared to Taken) features a larger-then-life performance by the charismatic Ma Dong-seok (billed here as Don Lee) as Dong-chul, a hard-working family man whose wife is kidnapped by sex traffickers. There isn't a lot of room here for personality development, but Washington and Pine provide convincing characters, the veteran driven by love of his job, the new guy more cynical. Unstoppable (Seongnan hwangso) Part of the World Perspectives Strand. That allows him a plausible way to provide an overview and narrate the action a similar device was used by his brother Ridley Scott to help us follow events in his " Black Hawk Down" (2001).
#Unstoppable movie cast and crew tv
Overhead, news choppers circle, providing a live TV feed that Scott intercuts with the action. In the railroad's corporate offices, an executive ( Kevin Dunn) is concerned mostly about the cost of losing the train, which seems harsh, since it is carrying hazardous materials and is rocketing straight toward the heart of Scranton, Pa. In the station yard, a yard master named Connie Hooper ( Rosario Dawson) is in charge of dispatch and operations. In the cab of another train, a longtime engineer named Barnes ( Denzel Washington) is breaking in a new man, Colson ( Chris Pine). Scott tells the story from several points of view.