Movie Trailer Friday: The Taking Of Pelham 123

Posted: April 10th, 2009 | Author: miconian | Filed under: Movies | Tags: , , , , , , | Comments

This movie is about a police car crash. See, it’s a really special police car, sort of the mascot of the department. All the officers love it, and they’ll do anything to protect it. And yet they fail. It must have taken a lot of guts to make a movie so tragic and real.

Here are the poor guys who happened to be driving ol’ 123 just before impact.

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I know. Horrifying, right? Can you imagine yourself in that situation? And here’s why they’re screaming:

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Here’s a scene from the middle of the second act, where one of the cops is still in denial that he’s on a mission of no return. Joseph Campbell would call this moment “refusal of the call.” You can find it referenced in many screenwriting textbooks.

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Below is a great scene from about the middle of the movie. Right when you’re caught up with counting how many times the car is going to spin before it lands, you suddenly catch sight of these two guys watching from a distance. (I circled them so you know which guys I’m talking about.) It calls to mind that scene in The Thin Red Line (another Travolta movie), in which you stop watching a World War II battle so you can look at a butterfly walking across a leaf. Just like the butterfly will be ok even though World War II is going on, these guys will be ok, because they’re not in the car.

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Right when you start to relax and rationalize that everybody dies, they suddenly pull this on you. A cab. For a second, you think that maybe the person in the cab is going to die too. SPOILER ALERT!! The cab emerges unscathed. It just goes to show that in this movie, you have NO FRIGGIN’ IDEA what is going to happen next.

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For me, this was the saddest part of the movie. You finally start to accept that there’s just no hope. I mean, look at how high up that is. Jesus.

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Here’s the villain, played by John Travolta. I read an interview with Travolta and the director, Tony Scott, where they explain that this guy’s actual motivation is that he hates all cars. This shot is symbolic, because he’s on a train, and it’s raining, and he’s on the other side of the glass, so it’s like he’s using the old technology to shelter himself from the new technology, and also the judgement of God. But it’s futile.

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Finally, the completely dead car. I can’t believe they actually showed this. In the 1974 original with Walter Matthau, you just hear some crashing off-screen, and that’s it.

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You can tell there’s going to be a sequel, because James Gandolfini and John Turturro are both in this movie, but neither of them gets to do much besides stand around in the train control room and look pissed.

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Here’s the Quicktime trailer for The Taking Of Pelham 123

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Comments on “Movie Trailer Friday: The Taking Of Pelham 123”

  1. 1 amanda said at 4:14 pm on June 22nd, 2009:

    love it. thanks.

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