NEW YORK CITY — The best ticket to cure cabin fever could be a train ride from a nearby station or it may be the rated PG-13 movie “The Commuter.” The Commuter stars Liam Neeson as — a rail commuter — ostensibly on NY Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s Hudson Line, with a few outside scenes to establish this. Be aware that technical expertise has caught up with this dramatic tale. Also in the cast are Vera Farmiga, Elizabeth McGovern, Patrick Wilson, Jonathan Banks, and Sam Neill.
In brief, the movie is about a man who appears to be helpless in a situation over his head. A suburbanite with a mortgage and a family, Neeson’s character travels to work for his usual commute in the morning, and by the time he is ready for his return trip, his world has changed dramatically. For more than an hour, there are train scenes: in, under, and around this rather unique ride home.
Underbody cables and crawl spaces abound in one scene, along with truck details, maybe a little closer than you would want to see them. Even a floor latch plays a key role in that particular part of the movie. For the novice railfan, it was a lesson in the mechanics of passenger car below the floor systems.
Directed by Jaime Collet-Serra, a Spaniard who went to college in the U.S., he saw the movie had two direct challenges: How can it be made interesting with the background changing a little at a time; And dealing with the logistics of a story aboard a moving train? Collet-Serra says the light and background of the Hudson Line fascinated him. While shooting on moving train would have have been tempting, it was far easier and cost effective to use a studio set. The key to the movie? The train interior came from, of all places, a scrapyard near Cleveland, Ohio.
The seats, lights, and other interior fittings in the inside scenes came from scrapped Metro-North commuter cars. The 30-ton set, at Pinewood Studios near London, had solid sides in and out, moved up and down, and used hydraulics to move the passenger cars back and forth, on wheels and rails.
“It’s the most technical set I’ve ever built, because of all the different facets of lighting and camera movement and camera rig that had to be built,” says Richard Bridgland, the movie’s production designer.
Does it seem real? The train crew was dressed appropriately enough for the warm day that the train scenes took place on. The vestibules seemed realistic. The crews, dressed in a summer outfit of dark slacks, white shirt, and appropriate caps, communicated on radio devices much like the ones used on Metro-North. The conductor and assistant conductor were convincing down to the accents. The cast of train riders seemed as though they spent their workdays riding to their New York City jobs every day. The couplers used in one scene were Janneys. Anyone who rode on M1s will recognize the dark red and blue seats with 3-2 seating, which made the set creditable. The interior walls were painted a little darker than their Metro-North counterparts, and the glow of the lights were not as bright in the movie cars as their real life counterparts. Some outdoor footage was shot in the United Kingdom, and there are detectable differences from North American practice, inside and outside.
What were the differences? The train itself seemed to be diesel rail cars, looking more like a marriage between an RDC and a SEPTA Silverliner 4 sans Faively pantographs; Metro-North only operates electric multiple-unit cars and dual-power diesel and electric push-pulls. The movie train stops at 59th Street, 86th Street, and 110th Street in the tunnel on its way between Grand Central and 125th Street — they are not real stations. The train also has five-digit car numbers, not a Metro-North practice, along with stainless steel fluting: Metro-North only uses smooth sided cars at this time.
With European money financing the movie, aimed at a world audience, the differences will not be noted by a vast majority of movie-goers.
The Commuter, PG-13, premieres Jan. 12 in theaters nationwide and runs for 1 hour, 44 minutes.
There is such a thing as artistic license. The “differences” detailed in the article seem pretty minor, especially compared to the whoppers in other movies and TV shows.
Silver Streak is always the first one I think of. At the end, with the locomotive’s deadman control jerry-rigged by the now very dead villain, Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor and the conductor are stuck on a runaway passenger train, which turns our to have no emergency brake handles. And you can’t uncouple the cars from the rearward car, you have to do it from the forward car then jump to the rearward car. Naturally. Of course, uncoupling the last car doesn’t put the brakes into emergency either. As the train approaches the terminal, tower operator Fred Willard can’t route the train to crash harmlessly a siding. “I can’t change the switches! They’re all computer controlled!” MOW can’t clamp a derail on the track, because, well, Charlie took the last one home and he won’t answer his phone.
Stock footage is always good for a laugh. In an episode of Happy Days, we see the gang leaving the house in Milwaukee, then arriving at a Colorado dude ranch. In between we see a shot of their train…on the Pennsylvania Railroad. Nice five-stripe E-units. In a later episode, there’s a dream sequence where Fonzie’s car dies on the railroad crossing, and he’s almost hit by…an Amtrak F40. You know how bad ignition coil can rupture the space-time continuum.
I just saw the trailer, looks like the world’s longest commute into NYC. Must have started in Buffalo.
I’ll pass .
I’ll watch it, and I hope it’s good. However, the technical stuff with train movies is always a bit of annoyance – I’ve just never understood why they can’t get all the details right, it shouldn’t be that hard. It’s as if a real air-brake system (or whatever is at issue) completely prevents an interesting story from taking place on a train.
How did this RR car end up in a Cleveland junk yard in the first place
Didn’t Alfred Hitchcock shoot North by Northwest on the 20th Century Limited? If the answer is “yes” why couldn’t this guy shoot his movie on metro north?
3-2 seating with blue and purple seats what a ugly railroad car
Hopefully, all the actors do a good job. Liam Neeson is an excellent actor. He makes otherwise drab scenes really come to life. He is an excellent action movie actor. Why nobody ever thought about casting him as 007 or some similar character, I’ll never know. As for the accuracy of the train, nobody should care as long as it’s close. After all this is a MOVIE, it is supposed to provide entertainment not another dose of daily reality. Don’t enough people get enough of that on a DAILY basis?
“It’s only a mooovie” Alfred Hitchcock.
Recommend the Twilight Zone “A Stop at Willouby” A similar story and one of my favorites. Sorry for the spelling.
This brings to my mind the question as to why, time and time again, TV commercials for American products and store are often shot in Europe rather than in the US. You can always pick this out when you see European style trains especially in cavernous stations for instance. Another give away is how often steam locomotion is depicted by European designs rather than US designs. Oh, I’m sure, a lot of it is done with models, too, but turns me off just the same. .
I’ve seen the commercial, and have already decided to take a pass on this one, mostly for the same reason “Unstoppable” was “Unwatchable”.