The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Especially terrible disasters are called "train wrecks." This movie shows us why. Its needlessly convoluted plot creates a movie which at times transcends mere stupidity to be a painful experience, despite the "name" actors and actresses which it features.This film's significance is probably as a footnote to the history of Rob Lowe's comeback (it originally aired just before the premiere of "The West Wing," if I recall correctly, and on NBC, the same US television network as "West Wing").I originally gave this turkey a "7" rating, but having watched it twice since (SciFi Network likes to play it on national holidays next to "The Day After," please don't ask me why... ) I can't see why I gave it such an undeservedly high rating. It's more like a "3." "Needlessly convoluted" how, you ask? Well, how about Soviet nuclear weapons turning up as scrap in an American boxcar - when the sleazy scrap dealer could have made more money billing the US Department of Energy to transport them according to the regulations for such things (in the real-life Nunn-Lugar nuclear threat reduction program, the US Enrichment Corporation buys just the plutonium, not nuclear weapons - the Russians decommission their nuclear weapons in-country and ship us the special nuclear material). Even then, plutonium travels under heavily armed escort in this country - on armored semis, not trains, and there's never a whole bomb's worth (a "formula quantity") of weapons-grade fissile on the roads of the US at any given time.Whoppers like crates full of assembled Soviet nukes traveling as cargo inside civilian boxcars don't as much harm as obliterate willing suspension of disbelief in the audience.The acting is undistinguished - of course, for his comeback, all Rob Lowe had to do is stay out of trouble with the young ladies off camera during filming, but he put in a decent performance - nothing to write home about. But no one really shines in this film - Edward Herrmann gave better performances during his commercials for Dodge around the same time.The two-part nature of this presentation (it originally was a two-part miniseries on NBC) also causes problems - the movie shifts from being a mildly plausible sci-fi thriller in Part One to a survivalist cliff-hanger adventure (still not very plausible) and the psychological subplots detract from the pace of the production badly.I can't recommend this film for anything but background noise while one's busy doing other things. If you pay full attention to what's happening in this turkey, you actually enjoy it less. "Atomic Train" is an embarrassment to all involved in its creation.

Nearly every trite event possible has been thrown into this dragging nightmare. The evil money hungry young man sneaks an apparently armed Russian bomb onto a train. How did he get it on there? The Russian's are trying to "dispose" of this? Why didn't they disarm it? Isn't it easier to dispose of nuclear waste in Russia? And the spineless accountant has to go along with the scheme. Why do they always tell the accountant? But he calls in a warning (from the office phone to the train control center, not the police by the way). What do you look under to find the number for the train control center? Was it the chemicals that ate through the chemical resistant air hoses in a few short hours or was it the fire inside the boxcar that shouldn't have been able to reach under the car to the brake lines? And don't the brakes go ON like tractor trailers when the brake pressure is lost? Couldn't they have put the train electric motors in REVERSE? What about all those big wheels on each train car that run the MANUAL EMERGENCY BRAKES? And the train coupler failed? What are the odds? The government bomb experts have no idea what the bomb configuration is, but one brave man tells us he can disarm it in his sleep. And it just goes on and on and on and I could go on and on and on, but all bad things must end. And the very minute the crisis is over apparently somebody is rebuilding a house on the tarmac outside the hanger. How can so many good actors put together such a horrible movie? I hope you get to watch this too because misery loves company.

This is a movie of a "net", it has nothing but holes. However...the movie is so ridiculously lousy that it made me laugh and i can't help to start liking it , Maybe they made the movie this way on purpose because it's impossible to get this many morons working together and make a movie this bad.Think about A.T. as a "Mystery Science Theater 3000" movie then you can really enjoy non-stop laughing and cussing for 2 good hours. Every character in A.T. dies with a great-hilarious reason. i love every part when people get killed in this movie. the fat guy fell off and got smashed by the train, a kid climbed back up the train from the last car but tripped and got killed walking toward the back? and it's super funny when the "water is better than nothing" helicopter hillbillies screw up and, BOOM!. They should really make more people die in this movie. maybe Kristin Davis and Mena Suvari can show their boobs in the movie, they should get killed while having sex or swimming naked. and also, where is the dog in this movie? there should always be a dog in a movie like this, It can be a goofy K9 dog helping a bimbo soldier disarming the nuke weapon and both got toasted.by the way, this movie is totally not shot in Colorado, (very likely in BC, Canada). But of course they don't care if you know or notice it. This movie can be fantastic when you are high, it's so much more entertaining than "jeepers creepers". If you like this movie because it's just ridiculously dumb and funny, you might love "the Room", that is a cult classic of this kind!

In all honesty, I have to express my sympathies to Lowe, Davis, Morales, Suvari, and all the others involved in this cinematic debacle--either the paychecks just weren't rolling in, or they were conned into thinking this script had potential. I just saw it on TV, and I would have laughed a LOT, had it just not been so tragic and head-shakingly bad.I'm an actor and director, so I can speak to the quality of their performances, which were very good, considering the material they were given and the direction and production values and hideously implausible script. I would have loved to see more conflict between Lowe and Morales, and I could tell they were itching to inject it into their performances, but the script and production prevented any meaningful characterizations from coming out.I'm also a moderate geek, so I can state some disputes with the story which destroyed my suspension of disbelief from the first moment of the film. Buses don't move and stop that quickly. Trains don't zip along that fast without camera tricks. Air brakes, of the kind used on every train and commercial tractor-trailer vehicle in existence, by design, lock up tight as a drum when air pressure is lost. And these are all within the first few minutes. I lost track of all the technical non-sequiturs and outright lousy whiskey-tango-foxtrot moments early on, and came to the conclusion that the writers and producers had but a nodding acquaintance with reality and know no fact-checkers. I won't even get into the fact that no one of our erstwhile heroes should have been left alive after around the halfway point.Why the writers chose to make this flick run as long as it did...the mind lacks the courage to boggle. There's no legitimate climax to the film. What should have been the climax, the obvious 'boom', was reduced to a simple complication in the tale. from there, it was up-and-down rising action and denouement, leaving no fulfillment, only a feeling through the last third of the film of, "Dear God in Heaven, isn't this bloody thing over YET!?" No satisfaction from the resolution, no standout performances, no tour-de-force effects work (it was serviceable to the story...and that ain't a compliment), no plausibility, only a numbness and a feeling of having lost several hours, possibly an entire day, to a script that never should have gotten the green light.Thank heavens the marquis names have moved on to bigger and better projects and made names for themselves, so they can say that they've all dodged the career-killing Atomic Train bullet.