Imagine, in an effort to stamp out global warming, humans shot a chemical compound into the atmosphere that not only stopped global warming, but froze the entire Earth, killing ever living organism on it (oops)… every living organism except for those that survived on a train known as Snowpiercer.
The Snowpiercer is a train built by a multi-billionaire who doubted the chemical shot into the atmosphere would solve anything and wanted to guarantee his survival, survival that depended on a perfectly balanced ecosystem, an ecosystem he designed and maintains on said train with tracks that manage to circle the globe. All that remains of humanity, that survived the frozen apocalypse, now lives aboard the Snowpiercer.
Director Joon-ho Bong (The Host), along with Kelly Masterson (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead), has adapted the French graphic novel “Le Transperceneige” for the big screen, beginning with a short prelude defining the events I just described before thrusting us into the steerage compartment found at the ass end of the Snowpiercer transport. You see, imagine all facets of society as railroad cars and you’ll begin to form an idea of how this train is designed.
Begin with the lower class, muddied and emaciated, struggling to survive. Here we meet Curtis (Chris Evans), his friend Edgar (Jamie Bell), Tanya (Octavia Spencer) and her son Timmy (Marcanthonee Reis), Andrew (Ewen Bremner) as well as the wise sage Gilliam (John Hurt). Tired of the torment, watching their children being dragged away by the elite that occupy the front of the train, eating the same gelatin protein compound every single day and being punished in the cruelest of ways, they decide to rise up against their oppressors and take over the train.
On the other side of the fence, protectors of the elite, is a group of faceless mercenaries and thugs, all bending to the will of the train’s owner and captain Wilford (Ed Harris) and his mouthpiece, the easily androgynous Tilda Swinton as Mason, a character originally written for a man, but wholly owned by Swinton in a role tailor made for her talents. Swinton snarls and spits on those this train has determined to be lesser than. Hating her is easy and cheering for the less fortunate is a no-brainer, but where the film begins to flounder is in the question of “To what end are you rebelling?”
Snowpiercer wants to be two things; 1.) a violent action film, but this violence is predicated on your understanding of the film to be 2.) a metaphor for today’s society and the oppressed taking on the oppressors. As I said, imagine the cars of the train as facets of society and daily life; you have your butcher car, your school car, your terrarium, your aquarium, your EDM rave, your bar car, et cetera. All of this is created to form a perfect and balanced ecosystem. The thought is, the people in the tail of the train aren’t necessarily people as much as they are a necessity so the privileged in the front can maintain their way of life. If a piece of meat feeds 15 people and you have 20 people, the thought here is five people need to die. It’s not a matter of compassion or morals, it’s just math so — boom, boom, boom, boom, boom — down go those five and let’s have our steak dinner.
So Curtis leads his band of unfortunates to the front of the train, aided by Namgoong Minsu (Song Kang-ho), a prisoner on the train who built the system that locks the doors separating one car from the next, and Namgoong’s daughter (Go Ah-sung). The key to these two is their addiction to a drug called Kronol, which I don’t really want to get into in this review. My question for Curtis is, What are you fighting for and how many are you willing to sacrifice to get it?
I won’t take that question any further because it begins to delve into story spoilers, but suffice to say that while the ending of the film is its saving grace (outside of the final couple of minutes, which make absolutely no sense whatsoever), Snowpiercer would have been much better if it had spent as much time focusing on the logistics of the uprising as it did on keeping its secrets until the very end.
Snowpiercer does well in dealing with the moral question of what it actually takes to maintain an inhabitable society in the face of overpopulation, but it has issues in telling that story which involves several scenes that could have been cut, not to mention a band of characters that looked like rejected extras from one of the S&M clubs in the Wachowskis’ Matrix sequels. Additionally, who decided on the order of the train cars? Why is the rave car filled with drug addicts at the front of the train while the calming cars pushed toward the middle?
I enjoyed the performances and thought Evans does a great job as the everyman hero and Swinton is wonderfully evil in the role of the villainous talking head. Alison Pill has a scene that goes on for far too long and became so grating it was like nails on a chalkboard and a showdown toward the very end of the film is so ridiculous and unnecessary it’s hard to make a case why it would remain in the film at all.
Overall, Snowpiercer is yet another post-apocalyptic film touching on many of the same themes we’ve seen in countless other films of its sort. It’s an interesting concept that basically mashes up James Cameron’s Titanic with Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road” and throws a bunch of battles in-between to keep the action moving forward. It’s a fun film with some interesting ideas and given the scope I’m happy to have seen it on the big screen, but in the grand scheme of things it’s a relatively minor work.
