Breaking News! Good Guys Win Again! (duh)

Fun fact about me: I LOVE THE MOVIES. Going to the movie theater, watching a movie at home, watching a movie online on Netflix, they make my day. When I go to the movie theater, I get there early and usually sit through all of the credits critiquing the movie that JUST ended with whoever I'm with (that and I'm waiting to see if those jerks hid a secret scene at the end. Don't you hate that? I'll talk about that sometime soon). Anyway, that's why when a friend was visiting yesterday we all (him, his girlfriend, his mom, my mom, my dad, my brother, and me) ended up going to see Unstoppable.

No, not this one.

Not this either. Though oddly this did pop up when I searched Unstoppable in Google.

That's the one!

For those of you who don't care about movies, this is the one where a train loaded up with a crap-ton of cars, including some containing hazardous material, is "lost control of" and ends up heading into oncoming train traffic at full speed and will surely jump the tracks at a curve located conviently right next to a huge group of fuel containers in the middle of a heavily populated area.

Nope, not making any of this up. Some moron decided that the best place to put a bunch of stuff that could explode was:
1. In the middle of a heavily populated area and,
2. Right where any train going more than 20 miles per hour would fall into it, causing said stuff to explode.

Not to mention that the guy who "lost control of" the train only lost control of it by being the epitome of fat, lazy, dumb redneck. The best part of the movie for me is that the aforementioned fat dumb guy is played by this dude:

I'M NOT EVEN KIDDING. IMDB that mother if you don't believe me.

Seriously, when you hired the fat dumb guy from pretty much every movie, you had to know what was going to happen.

I'm getting off track. Ha, unintentional train joke!


What I really wanted to talk about is that from the moment I sat down in the theater last night, I knew without a single doubt that no matter how 'Unstoppable' and crazy-dangerous this train was, Captain Kirk was going to stop it and Creasy was going to help him learn about himself along the way. There were other attempts by the evil, money-obsessed train executives with their ties and their jackets to stop the train, but they didn't work (duh). So, of course I knew that by the end of the movie, the main characters would emerge victorious and vindicated after going rogue.

So why is it that at the climax of the film, when they're making their last ditch effort to stop it and one of them is hanging on for his life... I got tense for a moment and thought "Is he going to make it?!"

SPOILER ALERT!

Of course he made it and they stopped the train. Duh. Everybody knows that if the trailer says something about 'the underdogs' or 'impossible odds' or no one believes that the main characters can do it, they are totally going to do it.

Scientists refer to this as the Mighty Ducks Phenomenon.

I wasn't the only one who got pulled in for that one brief moment. I heard all the people around exhale in relief just like I did, and there was a good chunk of the audience that started clapping. I mean, come on. But when I thought back to similarly inspiring/impossible situation movies I've seen, I realized that no matter how much I talked or made fun of the movie throughout, I always get sucked in at the one scene where no one is quite sure whether or not Adam Sandler is going to get that last touchdown and win the game.

Maybe it's something about everybody feeling like the underdog sometimes and just wanting to see the good guys win. Or maybe the idea of the good guys NOT winning is so alien to us at this point that when it looks like they might fail, we all get freaked out because it's just so wrong.

Oh, that's it, I really don't know why that happens, I just wanted to talk about it for a little bit. If you guys have any thoughts feel free to comment, I'll see you all tomorrow for a rousing chat on whether or not having more babies for the sole purpose of using them as footballs is morally wrong.

Seriously, how could something this cute be wrong?

Stay classy!