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Rebecca De Mornay, Eric Roberts, and Jon Voight in Runaway Train (1985)

Review by Ascendingsun

Runaway Train

10/10

The Journey Towards The Surrender Into One's Destiny

This film is symbolizing humanity's final letting go of control over nature, and ultimately, a willing surrender to its mysterious, elemental power. Humans have been for a long time gradually turning themselves into beasts and machines as a result of constant resistance to the destructive and creative nature through top down man over woman, mind over body, man over nature, light over dark capitalist hierarchy.

The film's core image (an unmanned locomotive hurtling through snow) lends itself to multiple metaphors, one of which is the tension between human-engineered order and the raw force of the natural world. The song at the end is also intentional, its title means "And On Earth Peace To All People". Because only by surrender to nature we can can bring peace to this world, and it is only fear of death that creates divisions between people, the lack of trust in her mystery, wonder and glory to take us into the nothingness in order to be as one with everything. The train is Mother Nature's Avatar that takes us into her metaphysical womb in order to be guided by divine order instead of the man-made order - it is a journey of surrender to garden of eden. This is why this film is so powerful, it speaks on an unconsicous level to something primordial that on the inside we know it resonates, this is it, it is an existential transcendent truth that leads to salvation.

Final sacrifice: Manny's decision to uncouple and face death alone atop the speeding engine can be read as a ritualistic offering-an acceptance of nature's inscrutable will rather than a last-ditch effort to impose his own.

Disappearing into the whiteout: The closing image of the lone engine vanishing into the blizzard mirrors mythic journeys into the unknown, suggesting that true freedom (or peace) lies in yielding to nature's inscrutable path.

It is about finding ourselves in the deepest void. That is how many of us had to reach the end of the line, sometimes standing on top of a building ready to jump, it is those times when people face the truth, like for example that they are not males as assigned at birth, but actually were born as girls all along, it shatters everything, all illusions about who we thought we were, it comes from within the void, not imposed upon us, but from the deepest cores of our spirit that is asking to be brought out into this world to free humans from the traps of the physical matter and the illusory abstract ideas and narratives around our identity, this is the spiritual bridge and the divine mission that many humans are bringing into this world to free humanity from self destruction cultivated by a gradual reduction of each other into objects and property to kill the spiritual authority of the land and body. This is what this film is about on a metaphysical level, spiritualizing the body and the earth.
  • Ascendingsun
  • Jul 10, 2025

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