Based on a story by Akira Kurosawa. You might be surprised but the movie grabs you right away. Jon Voight plays an escaped convict trying, with his best friend (a very young Eric Roberts), to make a getaway by jumping on a set of 4 train engines in a railway yard somewhere in Alaska. Rebecca De Mornay is a railroad worker sleeping in one of these locomotives. When the engineer has a heart attack he accidentally causes a series of events that burn out the brakes while setting the powerful engines off at high speed.
That's the simple, brief synopsis. But we find so much more going on in this film: a combination of a modern take on Classical Greek tragedy layered with the metaphor of an out-of-control, unstoppable force. Everything about the story and the action and the life of the main character crystallizes with stunning clarity with just one line, spoken calmly, amidst all the noise and terror: "I wish I could." (To tell you more would be an unforgivable spoiler).
The Mechanics Institute Library has Runaway Train in DVD.
