History Film / Unstoppable

* ActorAllusion: DenzelWashington's character is named Frank Barnes; in ''AmericanGangster'', a prior film of his (which just so happens to have been made by Tony Scott's brother {{Ridley|Scott}}), there is a character named Nicky Barnes, and Denzel played Frank Lucas.

* JustTrainWrong: The producers apply a little ArtisticLicense and alter locomotive road names, cab numbers and some reporting marks on the freight cars. Other than that, it's refreshingly absent. Most everything you see is a ''real'' locomotive on ''real'' active track moving a ''real'' train.

-->--'''Connie Hooper, [[HighConcept aptly summarizing the plot]]'''

''Unstoppable'' is a 2010 action film starring DenzelWashington, ChrisPine and RosarioDawson, and directed by Tony Scott. It's got a fairly simple plot -- a train loaded with hazardous chemicals loses its driver and [[RunawayTrain runs unmanned]] across rural Pennsylvania, and train engineers Frank Barnes (Washington) and Will Colson (Pine) have to stop it before it reaches a tight curve and derails in the middle of the large town of Stanton -- which just so happens to be Will's hometown.

* OhCrap: The look on Connie's face when Dewey informs him the throttle on 777 was set to notch 8 (full throttle) just before he lost it.

** Weirdly, the only real example of it wasn't one of the trains, it was a ''signal'', which was ringing loudly and flashing right before [[spoiler: Dewey's Hi-Rail truck clips it and knocks off its door.]] Position-light signals don't flash aspects, and no trackside signal actually has a bell - engineers wouldn't hear it anyway.

** The crowd surrounding the site in which the trail was going to be derailed.

Remember those math problems, where train A leaves station A at 45 MPH, and train B leaves station B at 35 MPH, and if the stations are 60 miles away from each other, when will they pass?

* ObstructiveBureaucrat: Played straight with Galvin but averted with Kevin Corrigan's character, Inspector Werner.

* JustTrainWrong: The producers apply ArtisticLicense and alter the locomotive's road name, cab number and model.

* NoOSHACompliance: Who thought it would b.e a good idea for a dangerous railway curve to go right through an oil storage facilty

* HellIsThatNoise: Every time the camera focuses on out of control train 777, it ''roars.''
** [[MakesSenseInContext Makes sense]] since the director wanted 777 to sound like a beast. Therefore, he combines real locomotive sounds with real animal roars to give 777 it's beastly roar.

->''It stars Denzel Washington and it's about him trying to stop a train, but the train actually resembles his career. And he's with this white guy, Nicholas Cage, and both of their careers are headed to the shitter, but Denzel Washington saves the train. At the end of the movie you find out Nicholas Cage's career cannot be saved.''
-->--'''Jared [=McMullin=] while inviting a [[FridayNightCranks prank call victim]] to watch Unstoppable with him'''

* AgonyOfTheFeet: Pine's character gets his right foot crushed while coupling up engine 1206 to the runaway 777's end.

* CompositeCharacter: Besides being based on the real people involved in the incident, Barnes and Colson's backgrounds were also combined with other real railway employees in Pennsylania.
* ConspicuousCGI: Averted due to the minumum usage of CGI. In fact, the oil farm in Stanton is done well enough that you won't notice it isn't real unless you know it doesn't exist in RealLife.

* {{Cool Train}}
* CorruptCorporateExecutive: Averted despite a plot that would easily lend itself to it. Galvin rejects Connie's initial plan to derail the train not out of any diabolical scheme to make money for himself, but to try to save the cargo and prevent the railroad from being liable for it, a reasonable concern even if his plan to accomplish that ultimately fails.
* CrazyEnoughToWork: Averted. The plan to use dynamic braking to stop the train by coupling to it from behind only 'sounds' mad. But the movie explains the physics behind it perfectly, so it makes total sense to anyone with even a passing familiarity with physics.

* DidNotDoTheResearch:
** Played straight with the airbrakes. When the air hose from the engine to the cars is not coupled (like in the film), the brakes on the cars are locked ''on.'' (This is a simple failsafe -- if the hose breaks, the cars stop.) The film gets this backwards, for story reasons.
*** This is true only if the brakes and brake pipe have been previously pressurised, as is the case in normal running but not necessarily in yard operations. If the brake cylinders on the cars are empty, the air brakes will not operate at all.
** The first attempt to stop the train ends when the manned engines go left at a switch, and the unmanned ones go right. This is physically impossible -- if the switch was that screwed up, the runaway would have derailed.
*** Considering that there are sections of track that are not that well maintained, it's possible that when 777 gave the lash-up trains that final push before they derailed, that the hit could have broken that section of the switch, allowing 777 to pass by. Otherwise, someone could have realized the futility of trying to side 777, and switched tracks at the last second as the Lash-up move out of the way. Allot of good the latter did ofcourse...

** It's pretty funny to first look up the real story, then browse the internet for commentary based just on the previews, with people making fun of how ridiculous and obviously contrived the idea was. It's even funnier to see threads people critcizing particular aspects of the movie after they got to see the entire thing, and thus had no excuse for not being able to [[DidNotDoTheResearch figure out that the stuff they were criticizing really happened.]]

* PoorCommunicationKills: Will's marital problems are mostly caused him being a CrazyJealousGuy in the ''worst'' possible way, but the fact that his wife wouldn't tell him about a casual acquaintance is what set him off.

*** Considering that there are sections of track that are not that well maintained, it's possible that when 777 gave the lash-up trains that final push before they derailed, it's possible that the hit could have broken that section of the switch, allowing 777 to pass by. Otherwise, someone could have realized the futility of trying to side 777, and switched tracks at the last second as the Lash-up move out of the way. Allot of good the latter did ofcourse...