Buckle up for a wild ride on the BBC’s ‘hackjacked’ train thriller
What you might call the in-transit thriller has long been a thriving genre on the big and small screens.
From the Airport disaster movie franchise of the 1970s to the gripping Red Eye and the daft Snakes on a Plane, audiences can’t seem to get enough of airborne thrillers.
In the last year or so, we’ve had two peril-on-a-plane TV series: Apple TV’s ridiculously entertaining Hijack, with Idris Elba (a second season is in the works), and the more slow-burning Swedish offering Hostage, currently showing on More4.
The claustrophobic setting of a submarine has also proved a winner in blockbuster movies such as The Hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide, and in the more modest BBC series Vigil.
Above the water, meanwhile, Under Siege (dubbed Die Hard on a Boat) had Steven Seagal facing down terrorists, while the taut 1974 British classic Juggernaut squeezed maximum tension out of a holiday cruise.
EXHILARATING
The best in-transit thriller of the lot, the exhilarating Speed, turned what should have been a routine bus journey into a white-knuckle ride (the less said about the dire, Keanu Reeves-free sequel the better).
Short of the bicycle, any moving vehicle, from a spaceship (Alien and numerous others) to a car (Steven Spielberg’s Duel) can be the setting for an in-transit thriller.
But when it comes to generating mystery, suspense and fast-moving thrills, nothing beats a good old train.
Alfred Hitchcock knew this better than anyone, which is why four of his greatest films feature trains: The 39 Steps, The Lady Vanishes, Strangers on a Train (of course!) and North by Northwest, with its famous phallic closing shot of a train entering a tunnel.
With their compartments, sleeping cabins, luggage cars, dining cars, tight bathrooms and various nooks and crannies, trains offer the perfect environment — enclosed yet expansive — for intrigue. You can hide on a train in a way you can’t on a plane. You can even hide a few bodies if necessary.
Given the enduring popularity of train movies, it’s surprising television drama hasn’t made more frequent use of locomotives.
By the end of episode one of new six-part thriller
Nightsleeper, starting on BBC1 on Sunday (September 15), it’s likely more than a few writers and producers will be kicking themselves that they didn’t come up with the idea first.
The person who did is Nick Leather, the BAFTA-winning writer of the true-crime drama Murdered for Being Different, about the horrific attack by a gang of youths on a young goth couple, one of whom was kicked and stamped to death.
Nightsleeper, which unfolds in real-time, couldn’t be more different. In an interview last week, Leather said he wanted to combine the ticking-clock excitement of 24 with a classic locked-room mystery.
He’s certainly done that, and a whole lot more. The bare bones of the plot is that cyberterrorists take control of the overnight train from Glasgow to London, locking the passengers inside, blocking phone and internet signals and sending it hurtling towards its destination.
It’s not a hijacking, it’s a “hackjacking”. But even before the train pulls out of the station on its six-hour journey, the propulsive first episode grabs you by the throat with a brilliantly choreographed and filmed chase sequence involving a bag-snatching (without giving much away, this is an elaborate ruse to distract from what’s really going on) and doesn’t loosen its grip.
The people who have to save the day are off-duty detective Joe Roag (Joe Cole), who happens to be a passenger, and Abby Aysgarth (Alexandra Roach), the acting technical director at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), who keeps in contact with him by phone.
If that sounds like a fairly routine setup, don’t be fooled. Within the first 15 minutes, the twists, turns and reversals are already piling up and they just keep on coming, leaving you wondering which characters to trust.
The series is technically impressive too. The train interiors — purpose-built sets with LED screens outside — are so realistic, the actors apparently got motion sickness.
If the rest of Nightsleeper is as gripping as Sunday’s opening episode, we should be in for one hell of a ride. Mind the doors!
‘Cyber-terrorists take control of the overnight train from Glasgow to London’