Review of Unstoppable (2010) by Shiira — 24 Nov 2010

The man from the railroad safety campaign knows something about the cargo on the train, the conductorless locomotive that's headed toward a densely populated Pennsylvania city. Molten phenol, according to the visitor, is used in the manufacturing of glue, and naturally, since we're not on "The Darjeeling Limited"(nothing blows up in the 2007 Wes Anderson film), the 777 has the potential to blow s*it up, due to its high combustibility factor.

"Can we trust him?" asks Galvin(Kevin Dunn), a corporate higher-up who was speaking to Connie(Rosario Dawson), the train yardmaster, before the happenstantial straggler put in his two cents on the impending crisis at hand.

"In a perfect world," responds the woman in charge, and since the unsolicited information that the third party offers is right on the money, these Pennsylvanians, for all intents and purposes, live in a de facto perfect world, where racial differentiation never rears its ugly head.

When Connie makes the recommendation that the runaway train be derailed before it reaches a town, a decision which could cost AWWR millions of dollars and precipitate their stock price to nosedive, in an imperfect world, the real world, a racist slip(Connie is non-white) by her supervisor would not be all that surprising, but Galvin, despite being furious with his subordinate for suggesting a plan that's antithetical to business, remains civil throughout the ordeal, without a trace of prejudicial animosity in his voice.

This ethnic variance is a pattern, duplicated through the pairing of Frank Barnes(Denzel Washington), the railway old-timer, and the rookie Will Colson(Chris Pine), a situation that's ripe for racial tension, since the "retiring" conductor is assigned with the unenviable task of training his replacement.

The warfare in question seems wholly steeped in class, not race, in which Frank objects to Will's blue blood(and all the privileges that money buys you), not white blood. After all, he works in an integrated trainyard; his best buddies are white, and even more importantly, old, and these like-minded veterans have even less patience with the new kid on the block than their black friend, who ironically, is the more open-minded one.

In another economic climate, the new kid on the block might be black, but "Unstoppable" is a sign of the times, in which working class whites(like Frank's friends), stung repeatedly by the voraciousness of the corporate machine, would now feel more malice towards the rich than a black man.

Frank keeps the peace when the two sides trade barbs about each other's respective generations; he accepts Will's hand when the union "punk" introduces himself. Out on the tracks, the widower father tells Will that his two daughters work at a Hooters(another example of seamless integration), not minding the dirty thoughts which may form in his trainee's mind about the barely legal girls.

The world of "Unstoppable" is practically utopian, a "perfect world" as Connie suggests, in the sense that a racial divide doesn't seem to exist. Once the train passes the pastures and corporate headquarters realizes that derailment is the only option available, and the towns of Arkow and Stanton, the two potential destinations for a catastrophic explosion, in an imperfect world, our world, would be determined on the basis of color, not size.

But AWWR is not FEMA, and John Galvin is not our former president. Since neither Arkow and the more densely populated Stanton are bastions for a predominantly black or white demographic, Frank and Will are free to banter.