[yason]

While I've grown with people who spend their after-cinema time analyzing how realistic the film was, and do acknowledge it can be fun to some extent, it's just refitting the art into a whole another game and that's by definition completely unfair. It's like writing a car review of the new Toyota Yaris and complaining it doesn't handle well on a race track.

The art of cinema is to pull people inside in a story that is generally mostly fiction. It's like deception by definition: you only offer the viewer enough pieces of an alternate reality to help his imagination get started and do the rest. The point of that exercise is to tell a story, and pulling the viewer into the reality of the film is just a tool in presenting that story. There is no point making the film's reality more realistic other than to be able to suggest it to the majority of viewers as a plausible setting for the story.

The train scene is a typical timed action scene. It's enough to repeatedly show an increasing velocity reading, similarly to how you might show a countdown timer in a bomb-defusing scene. The point of flashing those gauges or numbers every now and then during the scene is to increase excitement and tension, which I'm sure the original author well understands. Assuming the movie is in wallclock time could turn out to be a fun exercise but in this case it did not because the timing analysis just ended up pointing out an irrelevant detail in the movie that was never even designed to be coherent. So, the discovery is not fun in itself, it doesn't add anything to the movie experience, and thus wouldn't really be worth much attention.

[Houshalter]

Is anyone really criticizing the movie for this? Did anyone really expect these minor details to be realistic and accurate?

I don't think anyone is upset over this. It's just a fun exercise.

[x5n1]

Ah Toyota Yaris, the best and first car I ever drove. Probably because it was the first.

[brwnll]

"So, the discovery is not fun in itself, it doesn't add anything to the movie experience, and thus wouldn't really be worth much attention."

Sorry Fun Police, but you don't get to decide what's fun for everyone. This wasn't a movie review, and if you're not interested in people enjoying trying to decide if a completely impossible concept (a car from 1985 traveling through time) would have worked within the reality constructed by the movie, then feel free to skip down to the next HN story.

Reading, then commenting on, a story which is self described to be on a topic you have no interest in, can be considered nothing more than trolling.