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.
The executive producer for Tombstone is Buzz Feitshans, whose other producing credits include Conan the Barbarian, Red Dawn, Uncommon Valor, Extreme Prejudice, Total Recall, Die Hard With a Vengeance and the Rambo trilogy. Clearly, we’re dealing with an exec who favors pro-masculine action films (likewise for fellow producer Andrew G. Vajna); Tombstone is certainly no exception. However, to think the film a mere stupid, dimwitted-macho reduction of the Western is grossly insensitive to its touching lyrical qualities. Most would agree, at the very least, that Tombstone is an entertaining Western; personally, I think it's one of the best of the genre, and would rank it among my favorites of any genre.
First of all, the question of the film’s historical accuracy regarding the Earps at the O.K. Coral is all but irrelevant. The opening intro involves a series of film reels, partly authentic and partly fabricated, of cowboy and gunfighter reenactments from the early 1900s, at least 20 years past the events that take place in the story. Narrating the intro is Robert Mitchum, himself an icon of numerous Western classics. Hence, Tombstone establishes itself thematically not as a historical telling but as a figment/homage of early Hollywood Western lore – as much a legend of cinema as it is told through cinema. And yet within this romantic conceit there is an equally credible and semi genre-unique depiction of the Old West.
You’re average contemporary Western feels just that: contemporary – a genre often rendered moody, in muddled browns and depicting the West as a dry and desolate, rudimentary existence. Tombstone, on the other hand, shows a place and era of vibrant color and theatrics. The West was not just a booming economic enterprise, but a frontier of culture, intellect and style--on the verve. The heroes are enthusiastic prospectors; the villains, cheerful gallants. The whole world of Tombstone feels very alive, an exciting place to be. At various points throughout the film are themes of liberation from archaic social lifestyles, notably the romance between Wyatt and Josephine, and even New Age thought; in one scene, the youngest brother Earp muses spiritual literature, the afterlife and the existence of God. Other more general references include Shakespeare, poetry and gunslingers dueling in Latin. The theme is so persistent that it even reaches a certain satirical point; when the corrupt county sheriff praises the town for its sophistication, Doc Holiday, taking his cue from a bloody gunfight in the street, sarcastically rebukes: “Very cosmopolitan.”
If the narrative of the film seems a bit jumpy in the chronology of its events, the overall story is never-the-less told handsomely, with a certain brazen for conflict and action, shared with quaint romantic interludes. The whole movie is very… old fashioned in that way. Like all Westerns, the narrative drive is appropriately simple. The men of Tombstone (a man’s world, no doubt) are choice makers: Wyatt and the brother Earps come to town as honest businessmen who must then choose to enforce law when the lawless terrorize the innocent. A man of the lawless, the gang known as the ‘Cowboys’, chooses to side with justice. Holiday chooses his friend over his own fading health. Death ensues on both sides, all sides.
By the end, our hero must choose a new life, after having his old one obliterated. None of the characters are ever fully explored in any biographical sense, but each of their actions and behaviors are clearly outlined, and the range of acting allows for a great deal of nuance and individual personality. Beyond its two lead stars, Tombstone features some 18 familiar, hard working actors, from Powers Booth to the awesome Michael Bien, then Stephen Lang, Dana Delany, Michael Rooker, Terry O’Quinn, Billy Zane (etc) – a well fed Billy Bob Thorton and even a cameo by Charlton Heston.
Bill Paxton is younger brother Morgan and Sam Elliot, the go-to-guy for countless Western movies, is the oldest brother Virgil. Again, their roles are pretty much reactionary, but both are likewise given just enough room for characterization to make for a well rounded sibling trio. Kurt Russell is simply the best Wyatt Earp ever. I say this with total conviction. Consider Kevin Costner in the same role, or more recent non-yanks like Christian Bale and Russell Crowe playing their own Western leads in 3:10 to Yuma. In my opinion, all of these actors act too much like their trying to act like heroes of the genre.
Like John Wayne, Sam Elliot, Tom Selleck and Ed Harris, Kurt Russell is a natural for the material. There’s something so perfectly “sensible” in his portrayal of Wyatt Earp; a dimensional man, weathered, intelligent and regretful, while also believably deadly when the conflicts arise. The “Hell’s commin’ with me!” speech could have been laughable, and in the hands of a lesser or less appropriate actor it may have very well been. Yet Russell delivers it with aplomb – there’s no room to snicker at his war cry. You believe it, without a moments thought.
This, of course, leaves Val Kilmer. By now it’s pretty a much concrete consensus that Kilmer steals the show as Doc Holiday. I’m in no sense to argue otherwise. He’s pretty damn good. It could have merely been a showy, flamboyant performance, but there’s a blackness and a sadness that Kilmer brings to the Holiday character. In fact, the duality between Doc and Johnny Ringo (Bien) is one of the finer aspects of the story and is also, perhaps, the movie at its most philosophical, in a purely narrative/presentational form. Both men are haunted, both men are sick. But while Holiday’s sickness is physical, Ringo’s is internal.
You get the sense that Holiday is as much a damned soul as Ringo but the difference between the two is that Holiday has come to meet his inner sorrow with a certain and resilient, irreverent charm – a black humor mentality. Doc Holiday does not take his wretched life all that seriously, and is therefore free from it in a way; whereas Ringo is all too serious and hateful of everything and everyone. It get’s the better of him, as Holiday says after the climax of their gunfight: “Poor soul. You were just too high strung.” Holiday also has the advantage of having a genuine and loyal friendship with the noble Wyatt – his one lifeline to something worth living for, and dying for. Their scene together at the end of the film is easily the most emotional for me.
Tombstone is directed by George P. Cosmatos (R.I.P.) who also helmed Cobra and Rambo: First Blood Part II. Cosmatos was brought in after the initial director, Kevin Jarre (son of composer, Maurice)–who also wrote the film as well as Rambo: First Blood Part II–was fired for demanding/attempting to shoot his full script, which was deemed too long and over budget. Allegedly, Cosmatos co-directed, or ghost-directed, the film with Kurt Russell. It was Russell who most likely edited the script and prepared the day-by-day shot list while Cosmatos setup angles then staged and blocked the action. The end result is a rather straight forward, classical, none-too-flashy visual approach. However, the gunfights in particular are edited in heavy contrast between masters and mediums, and intense close-ups and inserts, not unlike Cosmatos’ work on the Rambo sequel. So the action, as a whole, is visually striking and powerful.
William A. Fraker is the cinematographer and, along with the production/costume designers, usurps the conventional Western pallet with lush primary colors, deeply saturated, under natural desert sunlight, in-camera street lamplights and amidst smokey saloons. Still, black is the dominant color, at least on a tonal level, and for obvious-and-ominous reasons via the heroes’ black hats and long dusters. The anamorphic aspect ratio fittingly emphasizes large groups around card tables, lateral rows of men in the street, extreme facial (eyes) close-ups and, of course, the wide Arizona landscape. Bruce Broughton scores the film broadly with a bold title and romantic theme, and surrounds the rest with high-tension bombast. It’s not a notably complex score, but, like the rest of the film, clearly states its purpose.
Tombstone does not end with our hero riding off into the sunset. Instead, he and his true love waltz together happily in a Christmas lit snowy street, laughing about room service, as Mitchum concludes his narration. The last words spoken are that of Earp’s funeral in 1929 and of legendary Western star Tom Mix who wept in his passing, bringing full circle the aforementioned theme of American history mythologized by the silver screen.
