Atomic Train (1999)

Great Film overall

From my favorite movies..

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

OR, Murphy's Law meets Too Many Cooks OK, here's how the story writing conference went for this film: Right! We're here to discuss ideas for a train disaster film. Any ideas? Freight train instead of passenger train with dangerous chemicals. Like it. Anything else? A nuclear weapon instead of chemicals. Hmm. How about nuclear weapon AND chemicals? Much better. Shoddy maintenance takes out the brakes and train careers toward city. Good. Any cities with 20 miles of track heading downhill into the centre? Tracey, check into that will you. Anything else? Chasing train that tries to stop the train but fails. Yes! Chasing train causes train to keep going when it could have stopped. Yes! Yes! And so on, and on, and on.After about a month the conference finishes and EVERYTHING is in the film, except the kitchen sink. Anything anyone could think about got included in this film. Doctors, police, firemen, military, heroes, disasters, fires, explosions, big trains with massive inertia, annoying kids (are kids always annoying?), useless women, helicopters, guns, lots of aimless running around.Too many cooks involved in this film.Then they had the script writing conference where they had to stitch all ideas together into a plot: Smuggle the nuclear weapon on board the train to save money. I'm sure that happens every day. Shoddy maintenance that nobody notices takes out the train's brakes. Daily occurrence in my neck of the woods. Drop the hero onto the train using a helicopter. Everybody does that in film these days, just look at James Bond. (That one has to go OK.) People fall over at the worst times and damage their legs. Happens to me every time I take the subway. Have the coupling on the chasing train fail, just because. Those things never work. Have something go right, like stopping the train, and then screw it up, like the chasing train suddenly hitting it with an almighty thwack that doesn't derail anything. Train derailments never happen in real life, no matter what hits the train. Derail the train. Nope, can't do that in case the nuclear weapon explodes. Hah! Fooled you. Just when you thought something was going to go right.And so it went. If anything could go wrong in this film it did: water meets sodium (boom), dangerous chemicals go on fire for no good reason, car accidents, bike accidents, helicopter accidents, mobile phones suddenly don't work, cars run out of petrol, nobody remembers to take a gun but everyone has a torch, accident blocks only road out of town.There's at least 3 films in this one presentation: train disaster movie, dangerous chemical spill disaster movie, massive explosion disaster movie. Thankfully, the film moves from one film to the next linearly so we're not troubled with having to keep track of who's in which movie. But if does get very exhausting after a while, just from the sheer onslaught of one disaster after another.However, there are a few redeeming moments. There's an explosion sequence that I thought was very well done for such a low budget film. And there's a couple of times where the whiny kids almost get it. (Sadly they survived, but I did get my hopes up for a second.) And there's a couple of black men who get to be heroes, instead of the usual chisel-jawed white men. (Go back to disaster movies of the 1970's and 1980's and try to spot a non-white hero.) Overall, there's just too much thrown into this film. If only they'd taken one idea and made a 90 minute movie, then I'd have had a much better experience watching it. And then they could have made the other two films at a later date.As it is, stock up on the drinks and chips and hunker down for a LONG disaster unfolding before your quickly tiring eyes.

Especially terrible disasters are called "train wrecks." This movie shows us why. Its needlessly convoluted plot creates a movie which at times transcends mere stupidity to be a painful experience, despite the "name" actors and actresses which it features.This film's significance is probably as a footnote to the history of Rob Lowe's comeback (it originally aired just before the premiere of "The West Wing," if I recall correctly, and on NBC, the same US television network as "West Wing").I originally gave this turkey a "7" rating, but having watched it twice since (SciFi Network likes to play it on national holidays next to "The Day After," please don't ask me why... ) I can't see why I gave it such an undeservedly high rating. It's more like a "3." "Needlessly convoluted" how, you ask? Well, how about Soviet nuclear weapons turning up as scrap in an American boxcar - when the sleazy scrap dealer could have made more money billing the US Department of Energy to transport them according to the regulations for such things (in the real-life Nunn-Lugar nuclear threat reduction program, the US Enrichment Corporation buys just the plutonium, not nuclear weapons - the Russians decommission their nuclear weapons in-country and ship us the special nuclear material). Even then, plutonium travels under heavily armed escort in this country - on armored semis, not trains, and there's never a whole bomb's worth (a "formula quantity") of weapons-grade fissile on the roads of the US at any given time.Whoppers like crates full of assembled Soviet nukes traveling as cargo inside civilian boxcars don't as much harm as obliterate willing suspension of disbelief in the audience.The acting is undistinguished - of course, for his comeback, all Rob Lowe had to do is stay out of trouble with the young ladies off camera during filming, but he put in a decent performance - nothing to write home about. But no one really shines in this film - Edward Herrmann gave better performances during his commercials for Dodge around the same time.The two-part nature of this presentation (it originally was a two-part miniseries on NBC) also causes problems - the movie shifts from being a mildly plausible sci-fi thriller in Part One to a survivalist cliff-hanger adventure (still not very plausible) and the psychological subplots detract from the pace of the production badly.I can't recommend this film for anything but background noise while one's busy doing other things. If you pay full attention to what's happening in this turkey, you actually enjoy it less. "Atomic Train" is an embarrassment to all involved in its creation.

I just watched this movie on USA. I'd always caught the very end of it, but never seen the whole thing. Now I'm sorry to say that I have. While I don't know much about the atomic end, I was a chemistry major in college. First of all, sodium is a metal, not a liquid. There is no way it could "leak" out of a barrel. The only thing leaking would be mineral oil with is what sodium is stored in. Secondly, while it does react violently with water, I cannot imagine it reacting with a huge fireball. I still have no idea how the movie gets from this point to the end because I was so disgusted with the lack of research into simple chemical reactions that I changed the channel.

I'm late to this party; it just came on TV (actually, is on as I write) and I, unfortunately, tuned it in thinking it the least of many evils. Should have watched the Mayberry RFD marathon of episodes I've already seen 10 E3 times, including the original airings. At least they bring back memories of a simpler time, when we literally left our doors unlocked and didn't bat an eye at hitchhiking to Florida, not worried about being raped, sodomized, dismembered, and dropped in a 55 gallon drum off a bridge.This movie is execrable. Others have already pointed out the many, many, MANY, errors of fact. I will simply note that the basic premise of the movie itself, the runaway train due to lost air pressure, should have clued the producers before they read past the first five pages of this abomination of a script. It has been 135 years since Westinghouse patented his first air brake. This is NOT state of the art technology, and how any moron, even the cretins who produce made-for-TV movies, could base an entire movie's plot on this idea simply escapes me.Loved the cast, hated the maudlin shyte they had to spout to play their roles in this misbegotten, miserable mess. What a joke! Fortunately, after the first 15 minutes I realized that it was irredeemable and spent the remainder of the air time doing some much-needed cleaning out and organization of my email folders. It was (is) on mainly for background noise, although I must admit that I did give it my attention during the more spectacular moments, the only thing offered by this garbage, and those regrettably separated by the batcrap that passed for dialogue and character development and interaction. Oh, well, at least it was abridged for this showing. GOK what it must have been like to watch the whole bloody thing when it was released.