I’ve been meaning to check out Unstoppable for a while, the 2010 action-thriller starring Denzel Washington and Chris Pine. Now I have and it’s about what I expected it to be; that is to say, a very cool, good-not-great piece of entertainment aimed squarely at the side of America that Hollywood generally tries to ignore.

The story (based loosely on real events – more on that below) centers around railroad workers in rural Pennsylvania. It kicks off with a lazy schlub fudging on his job while moving a huge freight train designated triple-7. When he jumps out of the cab to change a switch, he fails to set the controls right, resulting in the train running away with no one at the helm. At first his superiors think it’s just a ‘coaster’: a loose train running on momentum, relatively easy to stop. But, on further investigation, they realize that it’s actually under power…in fact, he set the throttle all the way forward. Oh, and it’s carrying a load of highly toxic chemicals.

The result is a sort of disaster or monster movie, where the monster is a runaway freight train barrelling through the American countryside at seventy-miles an hour. And, as the film repeatedly demonstrations, something like that is more or less…well, the title.

Enter Chris Pine and Denzel Washington as a pair of railroad workers. Washington’s a veteran employee who perfectly knows his way around trains, while Pine is a young rookie from a connected union family whose mere presence gets under his co-workers’ skins. It’s Pine’s first day (of course), and he’s preoccupied with marital problems, while Washington is unflappably commanding and competent, to the point of forgetting to call his daughter on her birthday. When they become aware of the problem and narrowly miss being pancaked by triple-7 (it takes out one of their rear cars), they hatch an idea of how to slow it down and set off to save the day.

Meanwhile, Rosario Dawson is the railroad dispatcher overseeing the crisis from under the stifling oversight of the corporate suits who are more concerned with avoiding financial loss and a PR disaster than with saving lives.

To start with, the premise is really cool; a freight train running uncontrolled through the countryside and flattening anything in its path. It’s a novel set up for a disaster film, but one that makes immediate visceral sense. When you have something that weighs about ten-million pounds and is traveling over sixty miles an hour, then there’s not a whole lot you can do about it. Anything that gets in its way is going to get pulverized. Now attach toxic chemicals and send it towards a tight curve in a populated area and you can see where this is going. A straightforward, but daunting logistical problem of “stop something that big going that fast before it gets to this point.”

It partly helps and partly hinders the film that they almost exclusively used real trains and real tracks. On the one hand, it avoids taking you out of the narrative with lame cgi and it gives you solidly real and impressive machinery to watch in action. On the other, logistically you couldn’t actually film with a train going that fast all the time, which means that in many shots the monster train is very clearly going a lot slower than it’s supposed to be, which is disappointing. Likewise, real trains kind of limits exactly what they can do, so there are only a few bits of triple-7 demonstrating its awesome power by running through things.

The other thing that stands out about this film is the fact that it centers on ordinary, blue-collar men who are actually fairly convincing as ordinary, blue-collar men and who save the day using their on-the-job expertise. It’s a bit of a dramatized and fun reminder of the thousands of men who operate the nation’s veins and organs, doing hard, unglamorous, but necessary jobs to make the whole thing possible. How many of us ever consider the railroad industry except in an historical context or when we’re frustrated at the airport? Yet it’s a necessary component to our lives, and it has the potential to go horribly wrong if the people involved didn’t know what they were doing and didn’t take it seriously (like the guy in the opening doesn’t). They also make a point of identifying a few of the characters as veterans recently returned from Afghanistan.

It helps too that both Pine and Washington are good actors (Washington in particular melts into his role as usual), and that the script successfully writes them as the kind of men who would be found doing this sort of thing. They’re not super-well educated or spouting lefty platitudes; they’re earthy, straight-forward men who speak plainly and look things in the face. Like when Washington reveals that his daughters are paying their way through college by working at Hooters. Pine can’t help reacting while Washington shrugs and laughs that “I’m used to it.” Or his amusingly frank interaction with Dawson’s character at the end when they actually meet in person for the first time. Dawson too is a good actress, and she hits the “half-blue collar, half-white collar” feel of her role. I especially like the barely-controlled rage in her voice when she finally forces the unhappy schlub who caused the whole thing to fess up to how bad the situation really is.

This tone also extends to Pine’s ‘marital problems’. In a normal film it might be “the sparks gone” or “I had an affair” or something. Here it’s that he overreacted to finding her texting someone she wouldn’t identify, jumped to conclusions, and ended up threatening an acquaintance with a gun, resulting in a restraining order. That strikes me as more that kind of problem someone like this would get into, and which a typical Hollywood character would only do if here were definitely the bad guy (her forgiving him at the end after witnessing his heroism likewise rang true to me). Maybe that comes across as condescending, but it’s really not meant to; what I’m saying is that different social classes have different ways of expressing and weighing values, and that this strikes me as a dynamic that fits someone of this class. Whereas a Ted Lasso-style “I just don’t love you anymore” would ring false given the milieu (frankly, I find Pine’s actions a lot more sympathetic than the latter, but that’s another story).

I also like that, apart from the corporate suits, the people in charge are mostly reasonable, sensible people who take the situation seriously. First step is to alert the police and have them close down every railroad crossing in the thing’s path, while using helicopters to keep an eye on the monster. When one of Dawson’s people requests a police escort to try to catch up with the thing, they give it to him after only a little clarification (amusingly, he flashes his “Lead Welder” badge as if it were an all-access pass).

Since the film was made using real trains and with the help of real railroad workers, a lot of the details at work are true to life, including the physics involved with the plan to stop triple-7, which are actually spelled out for the audience. Procedure, train operations, track layout, it all has the ring of insider information to it.

On that note, the film is said to be “inspired by real events.” Said real events was the “Crazy-Eights” incident of 2001, where a freight train carrying hazardous material got loose and barreled through the Ohio countryside. Obviously, the film is a very dramatized and and fictionalized account of the event (not to mention moving it to Pennsylvania), but looking it up, I was surprised to discover that a lot of it actually is based on real life. The reasons why the train got loose are all real (except that the operator involved was a veteran rail worker, not a lazy idiot), the chemicals it was carrying, a lot of the methods attempted to stop it, and the successful final gambit are all taken from real life. Like, the scene where the cops open fire on the passing train to try to trigger the fuel cut-off, only to realize that they’re shooting at the fuel tank? That actually happened, just with one cop with a shotgun instead of several with assault rifles. Likewise the bit where the train smashes right through the portable derailers actually happened more or less as shone. The real train never got that fast (it topped out at about 45 miles an hour) and no one died during the incident, but again, I was surprised at how much of the film was based on reality. Here’s a good video giving a summary of the incident.

By the way, this was the last film by director Tony Scott, brother to Ridely and past director of Top Gun and Crimson Tide, among others. He tragically committed suicide for unknown reasons (probably health related) two years later.

Overall, this is definitely a ‘good, not great’ film. The camera work is a little janky and over-energetic at times, the action lags a bit in places, and the ending felt a bit anti-climactic. Also, given the hypothetical stakes by the end, I have wonder why no one suggests dynamiting the tracks, though that might be my rail ignorance talking. More seriously, it is ridiculous to keep seeing crowds of people and reporters gathered around where they expect the train with its toxic payload to crash. They come within a hair’s breadth of literally having the talking head declare “We come to you live from what is about to be the site of a massive chemical disaster.” On the same token, why do they have cop cars parked all along the line of where they hope the train will derail? And playing a monster roar over the train all the time was a bit much.

But for a cool premise and a refreshingly blue-collar take on the action / disaster genre with a good cast and some impressive practical effects, you could do a whole lot worse.