When Peter was starting to recall the accident, it was shown that he was running alongside the train trying to get to the bikes but when he started recalling seeing his father rape and kill Elizabeth Valentine he was on the control station at the time of the accident.
So, where was he really?
...and where was Barry? Didn't he also run to the bikes?
Barry just ran off; home, to safety, away. Peter had always had a false memory of running toward the bikes to try to prevent their causing the derailment - his mind's "cover story," carefully rehearsed - but he'd since had it pointed out "to" him, "by Duncan" - i.e., he'd finally realized - that the bikes couldn't have been the cause. His actual memory of seeing his father at the switch station had replaced the running-for-the-bikes memory, or at least had begun to do so.
What I didn't understand was how he could have seen from ground level that something was going on up in the building. I guess maybe he saw his father by a window and wondered why he was there; he's later shown (as a child) huddled in the corner of its little porch, looking stunned, so obviously went up to see what it was.
Yeah--one thing that didn't make sense to me in the final version that we see is the blocking. Specifically when the dad grabs Elizabeth and Peter is standing right outside the window and then later when he emerges with the body in his arms. Peter is right there--to the point where the dad not noticing him seems almost impossible.
So it's either bad blocking, or maybe even this "final" version of what we see isn't totally what happened.
I was actually pretty confused by the whole layout of the woods, the place where the car was parked, and the railroad tracks. I ultimately didn't understand exactly the sequence of events: the girl screams, the girl runs away, the boys hear the train, the boys run for the bikes. Yet somehow the dad and Elizabeth are already in the small railroad house? Peter runs right for the tracks which leads him to the station house, so how did both the girl and the dad (who we never see leave the car) get there before him?
I'd like to be charitable and say that even at the end we are still seeing a slightly scrambled version of what really happened, but I suspect it was more just laziness from the people who blocked out the scene.
I agree, it was very confusing. For one thing, I don't recall the boys walking very far from where they left their bikes - certainly not as far as Peter's false memory indicates, per his running. And why did they leave them on the tracks in the first place? It seems that in such a small town (?) they'd know the train schedule. And yes, Peter would surely have been noticed on that porch.
Not to mention that an investigation would have shown that the train was de-railed by the track switch being thrown, not by bikes - but then, no
movie!
Right--I kind of rolled with the movie, but I had a lot of issues with the logic in the end.
Not to mention that an investigation would have shown that the train was de-railed by the track switch being thrown, not by bikes
And speaking of the investigation: Elizabeth Valentine was raped and strangled to death and the best the coroner could say was "inconclusive"?!
Well maybe, but consider that Peter's dad was on the police force at that time and being the type of person he was it is reasonable to believe he had a hand in suppressing an investigation and influencing the report of her death.
..*.. TxMike ..*..
Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes not.
That makes sense. It is a small town with a small police force, so I could definitely see how someone in authority could keep something like that quiet. And to be fair, if you find a recently dead body in a trainwreck, you most likely aren't thinking "murder". The coroner would have been processing 40-some bodies, so they might not have been the most thorough autopsies/inspections.
I think that one of the reasons I'm kind of grumbly about some of these things is that the movie is layering an unreliable narrator (the events we see from Peter's point of view) together with things that we are supposed to infer. Yet because we keep seeing jumbled or incomplete portrayals of events, it is hard to have a solid ground from which to make those inferences and so some of the gaps can feel more like plot holes.
Like I said earlier, I still don't understand how Elizabeth and the dad got to the station house before Peter. I could fill in the gap by inferring that Peter got turned around in the woods following Elizabeth. The dad caught her near the station house or caught her and dragged her to the station house. Then Peter makes his way back to the tracks and comes across them. But that's a bit of lifting for me to do as a viewer. I don't need every element of the crime explained explicitly, but I felt like I was having to make up my own explanations for a few too many things.
I really enjoyed this movie, but I agree about the sequence of events laid out being quite confusing..
I immediately knew something was up with the father when Peter made the comment early on that his father was always out in the garage by himself when Peter was a kid. So I was just waiting for his father to be implicated in some way in the accident. At least this bit of foreshadowing was decent, I'll give them that.
But the idea that a 13-14yr old girl who had been missing for 28 days at the time of the accident, and was the only person whose cause of death was undetermined, would not be looked at further by the coroner is pretty hard to swallow.. Even with the father being high up in the local PD. In 1987, they would have done a rape kit on this girl, even if they did think she was ultimately killed in the train crash.. This girl's parents would want to know where the heck she had been for the previous 28 days.... It would have been one thing if she had only been missing a couple of days, could be chalked up to a runaway scenario...but a month? I think not.
Plus all the things you pointed out about the distance they walked from the tracks vs. the distance Peter had to run back to the tracks at the time of the accident, Peter's placement during the events, the fact that there was no scene of the father drilling into young Peter's mind the story HE wanted him to remember, weakened the film considerably. It's too bad, because with a few simple changes they could have fixed these holes. Overall though, I liked it. It kept my attention throughout and told a good story.
Overall though, I liked it. It kept my attention throughout and told a good story.
Peter put "12" on her intake form. It was strange that early on in the film she keeps showing him her train pass. As if that glosses over her having been missing for 28 days total when it appeared as if she had only just been kidnapped. I think he did not recognize the car because if you look closely, the high beams are on. That made me wonder tho why both both, in both versions, were staring directly into them without squinting.
share*boys*
shareI feel like the train pass was a weird misdirection. As was the whole "We have her!" thing with the daughter. If I'd liked the movie a little more, I might be more inclined to go back and rewatch it to look for other clues that were put into those earlier scenes. I mean, she also seemed a little old to be carting around a doll.
I suppose it's possible that the girl had actually run away and spent a few weeks with a boyfriend or something (implausible, but possible), and only actually got taken/picked up by the dad on that last day or two. That seems to make more sense to me than the idea that the dad had somehow been holding her captive for a month without his family knowing.
I obviously enjoy nit-picking plot points, but I think that the script just sort of went where it needed to go to connect the dots, even if ultimately that meant things that seem contradictory.
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That, and/or the fact that a train crash happened back in 1987 with 47 fatalities - I doubt the small town coroner would have even thought or had the resources to do a full-blown autopsy, which might reveal the rape, even if they couldn't readily identify exactly what caused her death.
shareI know that I'm putting probably WAY too much thinking time into these plot points.
I don't know enough about what happens after something like a train crash to know if the local coroner would have actually autopsied (in any kind of thorough way) all of the bodies. But, like an earlier poster mentioned, you'd think that the girl who had been missing would have been paid extra attention in postmortem because unlike the other victims she actually had possibly been the victim of a crime (kidnapping or corruption of a minor or whatever). I would think that they'd be scrutinizing her closely to figure out where she'd been and what she'd been up to since her disappearance. For example: where did she get on the train? Who saw her at the station? Did she have a ticket in her possession? Where was she trying to go?
I also think it's unlikely that an accident on such a large scale (derailed train and almost 50 dead people) wouldn't have bigger authorities (the American equivalent to either a state or federal authority) involved in the investigation. I would think that the Australian rail system is kind of like the American Rail system in the sense that it is overseen by a Federal-level authority. Also, that even if the local authorities were allowed total control over the cleanup of the train/tracks and processing of bodies, at the very least there would be a national organization (like the US Railroad Administration) that would need an official explanation for the derailment. And that's not even to mention the fact that the company that owned the train would want to do their own investigation. If an Amtrak train derailed in a small town, I'd think that both federal authorities and Amtrak itself would insist on access to the site and would want to determine the cause of the wreck.
I think that this is just a case of a script that doesn't fill the gaps in a way that totally holds together. The movie isn't even about the wreck--it's about Brody's character realizing that his long-held feelings of guilt are actually displaced feelings of horror at having seen a horrible crime committed by someone he loved and not having done anything about it. The problem with having those kind of plot gaps, though, is that it kind of distracts the viewer's mind (well, certain viewers' minds) so that you can't totally focus on the emotion of the story.
It's hand-wavey at best. And one part of my brain kind of doesn't care because the big picture still holds up--but another side of me is irritated by those things that seem to be illogical.
I think that some viewers will happily fill in the gaps on their own (not a criticism of people who do this), while others will struggle with those elements.
I wonder if it was part of the false memory that the boys heard the train and took off running. Perhaps they saw the girl run away and the father follow, and Peter ran to follow his dad but Barry ran elsewhere, on only later on did Barry hear about the crash and think he caused it. Or maybe Barry also witnessed everything, and his guilt was about keeping the murder silent more so than thinking he caused the crash with his bike.
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