Before the Movie:

The previous showing of the movie I’m seeing is letting out. A group of exiting patrons is saying things like, “That was shit.” And “So he used the real people. Bullshit!”

Uh-oh.

After the Movie:

I’m still collecting my thoughts about this movie and will likely write a slightly longer review. But for now, I’ll just say the exiting patrons were right.

Thoughts Collected:

The script is terrible. Horrid, horrid dialogue. Eastwood had to cast the actual people because that’s the only way this film could work at all. Knowing they’re not real actors almost excuses this screen load of crap. Almost. Judy Greer and Jenna Fischer play the mothers of two of the heroes. I usually love them both, but not even they could make this dialogue sound believable.

There is really no plot. And the story is almost all unrelated filler. The only reason it seems to exist is to hammer home that if any of the elements you’re seeing had changed, the outcome would have been very different, and a lot of people would have died. The premise is that it was destiny or divine intervention that caused these things to play out in exactly this way. But that can be said of any event. If you left work a minute earlier than you did yesterday, you would have caused a terrible accident. If your boss had seen that email 5 minutes earlier, she wouldn’t have made you late. If she hadn’t run into an old friend from college 10 years ago, who told her about the open job, she wouldn’t even be your boss. If you hadn’t changed your major to what you did in college, you wouldn’t have been working here at all.

All of life is built on long chains of choices and coincidences.  And while it’s interesting to think for a few seconds about how all those coincidences converged to save the people on that train, it’s not interesting enough to watch all of them unfold. The fact that one of the guys met a girl and decided to stay in another city for an extra day, is not interesting in and of itself. And therein lies the problem with this film. It would have made an interesting short that concentrated on the incident on the train. But there’s just not enough content to sustain a feature film.