Out In The Train Smoke And Dreams 2000s Night – Denzel Washington’ “Unstoppable”-A Film Review

Click on the headline to link to a Wikipedia entry for the film Unstoppable.

DVD Review

Unstoppable, starring Denzel Washington, Telecinco Cinema.2010

Usually when I think about trains I think of my childhood (and on) love affair with that then vanishing way of getting around. Simple enough when the local commuter train, then soon to be abandoned in the 1950s golden age of the automobile, the highway and the Howrad Johnson’s (and subsequently McDonald’s) pit stop night, came tooting its lonesome whistle in the high North Adamsville night. Or that same fascination held up later when I took my first baby steps on the endless search for the great blue-pink American West night and wound up a few time travelling in some desolate empty box car pushing the Southern Pacific high desert night. And no question, even now I have very strong memories of what Tom Waits called in one of his mule variation day dreams- “living on train smoke and dreams.”

But enough of nostalgia, earned or not. For the film under review, Unstoppable, is a very different cinematic look at the modern day train experience on the American tracks. Trains and disaster, or the threat of disaster, are no strangers today, and have not been since the beginning of the railroads. The runaway train that stars in this film, the old 777 running highly dangerous cargo through rural Pennsylvania in this case, is just a continuation of the danger associated with tangling with the train smoke (from whatever fossil fuel used). And this saga is based on a real incident too boot.

Through carelessness (and corporate speed-up policies) a railroad man makes a series of wrong decisions about how to fix a problem on his long-line freight train. And the thing takes off-ummanned. Naturally all hell breaks loose as everyone from the yard master to corporate headquarters tries to figure out how to stop the thing short of shooting it (although that thought I am sure crossed somebody’s mind). No problem though because old railroad man Denzel Washington, ready to be tossed on the washed-out heap and training his “new boy replacement,” just happens to be on that same track coming the other way. Now once Denzel Washington is on the case, any cinematic case, from cop to Malcolm X to washed-out train engineer, one can rest easy. Sure there will be a couple of close calls, quite a few actually, in the hour and one half of the film but at the end of the day no highly explosive cargo is going to harm urban areas. No way. Now we can all go back to thinking about train smoke and dreams.