Editing the movie Speed down to just shots of the speedometer gets a little confusing since your mind will either try to figure out just what part of the movie each scene is at or you’ll go nuts trying to figure out why you hear swearing in the background and why the needle keeps going up and down so much throughout the clip. If you’ve watched the movie then you know that the bus is about to explode if the speed drops below 50 mph. The trick is that the driver has to maintain that speed through anything and everything in order to keep the bomb from exploding.
There are so many variables to this movie however that only after growing up a bit and realizing just what it would take to make it work did I really start to question it. So let go of the speedometer bit for a moment and focus instead on Dennis Hopper’s insane character. First he’d have had to either know the schedules for each bus, which isn’t too hard, and then he’d have to sneak into the bus depot after hours, get by security, and wire the bomb beneath the bus and then mount the camera behind the mirror as well. This is all on the idea that no one would notice anything out of whack with the bus or the new hardware behind the mirror. Passengers usually wouldn’t notice anything but the driver might. It’s a big ‘what if’ that wasn’t ever really brought to light.
Then there’s the matter of the mad bomber that wasn’t even investigated. Was it not standard procedure back then? Nowadays the public knows what the perpetrator was like as a kid within a few days to a week of their capture or death. It might have been nice to know something about the guy or at least do the due diligence to understand just how lucky they were to survive their first and supposedly last meeting with him. But hey, they were lauded as heroes, so why bother?
Then there’s the idea that the bus has to keep rolling ahead in order to keep the bomb from going off. First of all, when the bus driver was shot that might have been more than enough to get him to take his foot off the gas and kill them all. Then the likelihood that Annie, played by Sandra Bullock, would have been able to take over before their speed dropped to less than fifty wasn’t all that likely. And then, huh boy, the fact that a city bus could plow through so many cars without stopping or stalling just enough to drop in speed is kind of ludicrous. A few of those cars would have been batted to the side without a doubt, but the bus’s speed would have paid for it with each impact. Honestly, if you’re a big person running over smaller people what’s going to happen? Each impact is going to disperse a small amount of energy and by the time you’ve reached the dozenth or so person there’s not much chance that you’ll be going as fast.
Oh yeah, the speedometer. Like I said before, if you haven’t watched the movie you could probably chalk it up to road rage. Otherwise if you’ve watched it then chances are you understand at least a few moments and what might be happening in the movie.
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