Unstoppable

Runaway freight train, deadly chemicals and physics – The Periodic Table of Movie Elements broken down to the bare essentials. Trains truly are an awe-inspiring technology that we so often take for granted. They represent the most enduring, unrelenting and even terrifying nature of Man’s dominion over-and-through his environment. We are the Gods; they, our Titans. A theme made all the more poignant when one becomes unmanned and let loose upon the world. In other disaster movies Man must contend with the natural world run amok or cosmic apocalyptic plots like asteroids or warmongering aliens. But in Unstoppable Man fights himself, his own creation, engineered from top to bottom, front to back, with steel and raw power.

In this particular battle the heroes are a couple of working-class analogs newly assigned as mentor and apprentice, neither with any enthusiasm. They’re regular guys with regular problems, namely marital issues, infringing unemployment and just life in general. Frank Barnes plays Denzel Washington, a screen persona that chiefly lubricates the action/expository narrative with warm familiarity. Chris Pines is the younger Will Colson who comfortably adheres to the rookie archetype. Rosario Dawson humbly plays the critical thinking dispatcher, Connie Hooper, who’s forced to negotiate company politics in parallel.

There are a few other colorful personalities that weave in and out of the crises as aids or hinderers, but the main character is the train, which, through clever sound design, roars like a tyrannosaur. The formulaic script may be an easy target for anyone expecting some avant-garde reinvention of the disaster movie wheel, but it is there to service the cinematic experience, not the other way around. So get over it, or don’t, and go watch something else. This is a movie for community folk who want to see a problem solved with guts and skill… and explosions.

Other filmmakers have long since barrowed from Tony Scott’s pioneering directorial style partially and generically to such an extent that the style itself is regarded unfairly as something derogative and often associative with the current popular rant against all things “shaky cam”. The problem is that most critics are holistically challenged. Lacking in sensitivity, they generalize over a handful of familiar camera techniques without any understanding, let alone appreciation, for the potential artistic context of the film as a whole. In so doing, whatever similarities are superficial at most.

Scott’s visual fragmentation and editorial kinetics is by far the best of its kind because it has evolved organically from the beginning of his career, thus rendering a shot-flow signature that connects to his very nervous system as a commercialist storyteller. Others replicate it (badly) for stock effect, but only Scott feels it intuitively, resulting in a visual language that maintains a more artful and thematic relevance to whatever the subject, be it the acid-trip fantasies of Domino or the multiversing imagery in Déjà Vu.

With Unstoppable said language acclimatizes for pure action and forward momentum. Note how the camera is constantly panning 360’s closely around the cab of our heroes or the rail station HQ room. Contrary to sanctimonious dogma, there is more than one way to tell a story visually; and while spatial master shots and traditional continuity would certainly impress audiences with a full and clear view of the rogue train spectacle, Scott, with a more abstract aesthetic in mind, frames and edits for chaos where the train is not a mere thing to be viewed objectively, but a monster that overwhelms the senses, blasting its way through scenes wholesale. The telephoto lensing doubles its size and separates the heroes, caught up on the mayhem, from a background of motion blur. One very cool shot is of Washington’s POV from atop the speeding train as he spots his rookie partner a hundred yards down riding the back of a pickup truck alongside the locomotive, the long lens rack-focusing the image into a single intense frame.

The running motif of technology fills every corner of Unstoppable, defining not just the central conflict, but the larger experience from everyone involved down to the smallest details. Stretching over the arc of his filmography but blossoming with Enemy of the State, Scott continues to explore the idea of reshaping events into media reality, as the train rampage is alternately viewed from live news footage and as blinking graphics on a computer console. Also, the manner in which radio and cell phones are the primary connection between characters across the film’s geographical canvas; only Washington and Pines are privy to intimate human interaction, and even they are split apart by the climax with walkie-talkies.

Unstoppable is a simple, adrenalized filmgoing experience and a continuation of director Tony Scott’s unique pop-artistry that delivers the goods with zero pretense.