There is great train porn in Unstoppable, but the humans have to do a lot of stupid stuff to set it up. If I worked for a rail company, I would be upset at me and my employees being portrayed this way. The filmmakers did have to do something because the real life event on which this movie is based was not that exciting. But they could have made the start more realistic. Maybe the filmmakers may have also wanted to make Denzel Washington the competent one.
So Tony Scott made the train go faster, made the chemicals more dangerous, added a first failed attempt to stop the train which ended in an explosion and death of a friend of a main character, some one rappels out of a helicopter when he could have walked across an engine, and Denzel Washington runs on top of the train for basically no reason. (You have to have someone run on top of a train in a train movie. It is the funnest thing you can do. I think it is even better than a random explosion.)
There is a pro-worker emphasis to the last half which always gets points from me. The competent woman in charge is balanced out by the scenes in Hooters, though.
Overall, I am glad that I did not pay to watch this in the theater, but it is a fun movie to watch on the TV. Right now it is playing on HBO and is rentable through Netflix. It is not streaming anywhere yet other than HBO Go.
Here is some footage from news reports about the original incident. At 46 miles per hour, the real train was probably actually going faster than the train used for the movie. (Although, this movie was done without CGI.)
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