Reviews

This is an excellent and beautiful film, poignantly presented by Eero Saarinen's son Eric. Using interviews with professional colleagues, in tandem with Saarinen's writings, it's especially effective in capturing the powerful, creative spirit of the architectural practice he built in the brief, yet meteoric eleven years from his father's death to his own, 1950-1961. As an architect, I'm familiar with much of the detail and backstory of both Saarinen's biography and the buildings we see in the film. This allowed me to pay full attention to, and fully enjoy, the absolute beauty of the imagery Eric has crafted. The atmospheric soundtrack composed for the film is perfect accompaniment to the visuals, and connotes an appropriate, near-religious reverence for the subject matter.

As a professional, I must admit a strong partiality to Saarinen's work, yet also, as a longtime attendee of the ADFF here in NYC I have seen many films about architecture over the years. This is easily among the best; a fulfilling aesthetic experience.

Several reviewers have already mentioned the believability problems, suspension of belief in the ridiculous premises etc..., but I will summarize:

-get manned train in front of train. Of course then all you have to do is jump from manned train to unmanned train using the end platforms. You don't need to (senselessly and dangerously) helicopter a driver on board from overhead- duh- but this is Hollywood!

-if you really want to derail a train you take apart the tracks - duh!

-miraculously, the helicopters can fly at below treetop level nearly the entire time, with multiple camera angles available so we can somehow believe that all the concerned relatives and general public can look at whatever TV they are near and instantly experience all the same views the movie viewer sees.

-Train driver has to ask traffic control exactly where they are and how far to go!? Um no- train drivers know every inch of track on a line they frequent and know better anyways exactly where they are because - duh- they are actually there and not looking at a computer display miles away!

-Train is finally stopped because injured guy who was actually on train miraculously jumps off (with a just mangled foot) into bed of pickup, and then miraculously jumps back on with further mangled foot (he did groan in convincing agony after first jump) as pickup driver matches speed from thousands of feet of miraculously occurring parallel pavement. like - duh? they didn't have plenty of earlier opportunity to execute this maneuver before with an unmangled foot guy?

Miraculous media TV footage provided by "Fox News" so there's a clue as to the base audience intellect this "film" is targeted towards. I've just skimmed the surface here, there's much more. It's endlessly insulting throughout- "Unstoppable" you might say, and I really can't waste anymore time on this- you shouldn't either. Unless you're a major Denzel fan. He WAS very good.