Let me get this straight. You’re saying a stunt done by real people in real time on screen isn’t possible? 
This wasn’t a special effect, folks. It was a stunt and was actually done onscreen with the cameras rolling as it happened. Admittedly, things were designed to make this optimal, but it doesn’t defy any laws of physics – it actually happened.
To me it looked like an accident, but I think it was supposed to be ambiguous–that is, we’re not meant to think the species-ist helmsman was completely out of left field. The ambiguity, I think, comes from the fact that it was SPOCK making a mistake. That is, if it had been Scott or Uhura (either of whom could probably done the repair) it would have been chalked up to human fallibility, but Spock is so much in control most of the time it is hard to believe anything he does isn’t purposeful.
I just went back and watched it. The moment in question does go down as described. Doc Ock throws Spiderman, and Spiderman does fly in from behind. In my mind, Spidey had swung around the bridge a few times, letting the train get ahead, but also increasing his own velocity by adjusting his swing and web-length. I was wrong, though. Spidey can fly, or at least adjust his rate of falling, apparently.
Another frustrating moment is during the same fight scene. Spidey is at the front of the train and falls forward. The air movement from the velocity of the train “catches” him and he stands horizontally for a little while.
The only thing I can really give them credit for, however, is when Spidey slows the speeding train and the front of the train crushes and the windows shatter. Too many superhhero movies have them interacting with things (like picking up a bus by the bumper) without the environment reacting realistically. I would love to see Superman, for example, break stuff in a frantic attempt to pick it up and hurl it at the Evil Bads.
Can you cite that this was a stunt performed substantially as it appeared? I’ve referred to that scene many times as an example of the gleeful contempt for reality that can sometimes make action movies wonderful. (The rest of the movie sucked).
Daniel
No, that was his spider-grip, or whatever enables him to climb up buildings. It still doesn’t make sense, because it looks like he has footwear of some kind on as part of the costume, but there it is.
I think he was saying that the stunt has been performed in real life (as in the videos Ale found). Clearly in the movie it was done as special effects rather than a stunt actually performed.
Missed the edit window:
I find the notion of a falling human catching up to a falling plane reasonable (and clearly it’s possible, given the aforementioned videos of it being done in real life). What I found cartoonishly hilarious about the scene was the fact that the plane is headed pretty much straight down into the bottom of the canyon and Bond can’t seem to change that – the stick is shaking violently as he attempts to get the plane to pull up – and it goes out of sight behind a small ridge, headed for certain doom on the quickly-approaching ground. Then a few seconds later the plane soars over the ridge, headed up a steep angle to clear the ridge and escape. That plane must have performed one heck of a sharp turn. Apparently the Russians equipped all their small planes with gravity polarizers back in the heady days of Goldeneye (1995).
How about at the end of Moonraker when Bond is having sex with the woman in zero gravity and the blanket is hanging off them!
The “lavatory to cargo hold to landing gear” bit may not actually be so implausible. According to Frank Abagnale in his autobiography Catch Me If You Can*, that’s how he escaped when he was being escorted back to America from Sweden. He didn’t break anyone’s neck, and he waited until the plane was almost stopped before he climbed down, but the cargo hold was indeed accessible by pulling away the wall panel inside the lavatory, and the landing gear bay was accessible from the cargo hold. Granted, someone best known as a fraud and con man may not be an unimpeachable source.
*In the movie version, he was being brought back from France.
Dr T and the Women is on TV at the moment, and they just had the wedding scene. At the start an overhead shot shows the guests all seated in rows. A woman comes in and runs down the aisle and then squeezes between the vacant aisle seat and the vacant seat next to it, to sit in the aisle seat in the row behind.
Since she had just run past this seat she could have sat down then.
In their defence, airline security wasn’t up to post 9/11 levels.
Saw a snatch of this last night-how did DiCaprio and friend emerge from the freezing water below decks-and then his clothes are magically dry? Also, the evil rich guy who survives-how did he bribe his way into a lifeboat?
The rich guy grabbed a little girl and pretended he was her father.
He didn’t. He grabbed a child and pretended to be her father. The guy filling the boat noticed but felt it wasn’t worth the time or effort to try and get the boat back up just to get him off of it. I haven’t seen it in years, though, so I may be misremembering.
Well, actually he did. Earlier on in the film he gives a bundle of money to a sailor, who promises to reserve him a place on the lifeboat. Later the sailor throws the money back in his face and says (approximately) “your money will do you no good now … or me either.” The initial bribery was a stupid scene. How could anyone NOT realise immediately the likelihood of being around to spend it.
To be fair, some of those fiberglass skis are very bendy. 
Ah, Commando. It’s the first movie that I can remember watching and realizing that I was seeing crap made into film format.
But you missed the first thing I always noticed about that movie. At the beginning, Arnold is chopping logs or doing something else equally manly and his daughter calls him in for lunch.
She’s made ONE sandwich for him. C’mon, Arnold’s a big guy. At least give him two. 
Hell yeah! I love that Firefly/Serenity!
The liklihood of being around to spend it was actually pretty good, for certain values of good. 20% of men considered as a group survived the Titanic disaster, and for first class men the number was 32.7%. For the crew the number was 22%. OK, not great, but a one chance in five of being alive with a big sheaf of banknotes is better than a one chance in five of being alive with empty pockets.
And, of course, there’s no reason to think that people would immediately grasp the enormity of the situation. What did Cal do when he was in trouble? Bribe. And do most people tend to respond favorably to very large bribes? They do.
People acting short-sighted in the face of imminent doom is hardly the most absurdly stupid moment in real life, much less film.