Scott, like Jacques Rivette always upfront about his willingness to integrate influences (some call it stealing), hews not towards the virtuoso indoor space arrangements of Richard Fleischer's ultra-tight The Narrow Margin or Anthony Mann's excitingly moody The Tall Target, but closer to two of the genre's finest outdoor assaults: Robert Aldrich's perfect action picture Emperor of the North Pole and Andrei Konchalvsky's existential Kurosawa adaptation Runaway Train. Since the early phantom rides, cinema has had a close relation to trains, and the tension generated almost automatically by the interplay of claustrophobic interiors and acceleration through a vast landscape particularly has been particulary fertile territory for visual exploits. Still, Unstoppable can be hardly faulted for directorial understatement: What the recurring slow arc was to Oshima Nagisa's Gohatto, those mighty camera sweeps are in Unstoppable-the basic movement for exploring social and personal relations in a situation of imminent breakdown. As such, it is both an expertly pared-down exercise in pure orchestration of tension as well as a distilliation of pure Tony Scott style-instead of the cubist, postmodern formal explosions of the three earlier crisis zone films (which at times suggested visual companions to the literature of Pynchon and DeLillo, not to mention to avantgarde sensibilities like those of Pat O'Neill), here Scott's expressionist Action Painting effects serve as punctuations and accentuations of superbly handled, old-school suspense dramaturgy. Intriguingly, after the delirious triple whammy of Man on Fire, Domino and Déjà vu, Unstoppaple now forms a diptych with its minor, but still underrated predecessor The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 of almost straightforward suspense filmmaking: But while the remake of Joseph Sargeant's still-splendid 1974 New York crime picture The Taking of Pelham One Two Three (together they make a for a great, entertaining double feature lesson about changes of a city and the corresponding zeitgeist mentality) was centered around a train standing still, Unstoppable is predicated on a constant increase of speed. "Oh yeah, Tony Scott-he's good," says even Lav Diaz, currently residing in Vienna's Ferronian headquarters, and further proof rushes into cinemas with Unstoppable (and to home systems with the highly recommended BFI unearthing of his 1970 medium-length feature Loving Memory on DVD/Blu-Ray).
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