The boomers and the silent generation got their share of attention in this multi-story TV movie about people involved in a horrendous car accident on the California freeway that runs all the way from the Mexican to way up north. Some stories run all the way throughout the film while other characters pop up later on. The take that people have on this will be based on the characters they like or the stories that appeal to them, ranging from teenagers who have a lot of angst and mature adults caught up in drama out of their control.
You get to see the horrendous pile up on Interstate 5 in the opening segment, and then the film flashes back to 48 hours before, showing all these people and the situations that led up to them being on that highway in the first place. The most touching for me was aging couple Buddy Ebsen and Harriet Nelson, dealing with her pain over a supposed terminal illness, while a young teen driver is forced at gunpoint to take in two hitchhikers whom he aides in hiding from the police.
Then there's widowed Vera Miles, being picked up by truck driver David Groh in a bar and the aftermath of what appears to be a one night stand. A woman in the hospital has a baby then finds out that the father was found dead on the freeway. The nurse in both situations is Donna Mills, making me wonder if the writer thought that this particular Hospital would only hire one nurse.
This is watchable certainly but often frustrating, because it seems very formula and the characters don't always seem fully developed. Robert Conrad and Tommy Lee Jones play highway patrolmen, after the young couple on the run. Everything in the script seems carefully calculated to build up to the tragedy that occurs, and what works for the audience is the fear of which characters will be among the 14 dead. In that sense, I found that unpleasant because it had nearly the same impact as being visited by a highway patrolman and being told that a loved one had been involved in a fatal car accident, something that many people can relate to and would hate to have to revisit.
You get to see the horrendous pile up on Interstate 5 in the opening segment, and then the film flashes back to 48 hours before, showing all these people and the situations that led up to them being on that highway in the first place. The most touching for me was aging couple Buddy Ebsen and Harriet Nelson, dealing with her pain over a supposed terminal illness, while a young teen driver is forced at gunpoint to take in two hitchhikers whom he aides in hiding from the police.
Then there's widowed Vera Miles, being picked up by truck driver David Groh in a bar and the aftermath of what appears to be a one night stand. A woman in the hospital has a baby then finds out that the father was found dead on the freeway. The nurse in both situations is Donna Mills, making me wonder if the writer thought that this particular Hospital would only hire one nurse.
This is watchable certainly but often frustrating, because it seems very formula and the characters don't always seem fully developed. Robert Conrad and Tommy Lee Jones play highway patrolmen, after the young couple on the run. Everything in the script seems carefully calculated to build up to the tragedy that occurs, and what works for the audience is the fear of which characters will be among the 14 dead. In that sense, I found that unpleasant because it had nearly the same impact as being visited by a highway patrolman and being told that a loved one had been involved in a fatal car accident, something that many people can relate to and would hate to have to revisit.