Here are some of the important things I learnt while watching this movie:
- Smart and gifted kids, when paying for their train fare and noticing that they have 60 cents left to pay, put in one small coin and are dismayed when it comes up short of the 60 cents.
- Further to the last point, that coin dropped the total left to pay from 60 to 25 cents. Therefore, there must be a 35 cent coin. There just must be.
- All people getting on the subway at any one station will sit within two metres of each other, all on the one carriage. Absolutely everyone else on the train will get off on the next station. This just must be normal behaviour.
- Earthquake is just an abbreviation of "the camera is shaking".
- During earthquakes, fire burns on the the outside of non-broken 15th floor windows.
- The only buildings destroyed in earthquakes are created by computers.
- Men whose chests have been crushed by a steel support pole are only in pain when the pole is lifted off their chests.
- Teenage kids are never freaked out by unknown men giving them money, regularly initiating conversation and following them around darkened collapsed tunnels.
- One spark is all it takes to set the entirety of a subway carriage on fire. Within a second.
- There's always a nurse, an insecure beautiful girl, a man dealing with personal loss, a nerd and an aggressive criminal trapped by every cave-in.
- "A train full of unsuspecting commuters" really means four people.
- Explosions powerful enough to send dumpsters with two people half the length of a storage room are not powerful enough to move anything else in the room, despite many other items being lighter and closer to the explosion.
And finally, imagine a scenario where a reporter is told, during a press conference, that a few people are presumed to be dead. If these people were to appear (alive, of course) right next to the press conference, how would the reporter phrase her next question? (Keep in mind that by now, everyone knows that the people are alive.)
a) "Now that we know they are alive..." b) "Why did you assume they were dead when..." c) "A source tells me that these people may, in fact, be alive..."
If you answered (C), disregarding the fact that she had no source who could've seen the people alive and then relayed that information to her, and the reason she knows they are alive is that she has seen them with her own eyes, you would be correct.