Snowpiercer

Director: Joon-ho Bong
Screenplay: Joon-ho Bong and Kelly Masterson (screen story by Joon-ho Bong; based on Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob & Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette)
Stars: Chris Evans (Curtis), Kang-ho Song (Namgoong Minsoo), Ed Harris (Wilford), John Hurt (Gilliam), Tilda Swinton (Minister Mason), Jamie Bell (Edgar), Octavia Spencer (Tanya), Ewen Bremner (Andrew), Ah-sung Ko (Yona), Alison Pill (Teacher), Luke Pasqualino (Grey), Vlad Ivanov (Franco the Elder), Adnan Haskovic (Franco the Younger), Emma Levie (Claude), Stephen Park (Fuyu)
MPAA Rating: R
Year of Release: 2013 / 2014
Country: South Korea / U.S. / Czech Republic / France
Snowpiercer
SnowpiercerSnowpiercer takes place almost entirely inside the titular vehicle, a train hundreds of cars long that hurtles along a track encircling the entirety of the planet, which is now frozen in a new ice age ironically brought on by human attempts to curb global warming. The passengers on the train are the only surviving humans, as the ice age has literally frozen the world into a permanent state of death. The train itself is propelled by a perpetual engine that resides at the front, although the film begins at the very back of the train, which is populated by men, women, and children who live in squalor and poverty, bullied by guards holding massive guns and fed daily with blocks of protein jelly that keep them alive, but not much more.

As is often the case, the seeds of a revolution are forming among the downtrodden, led primarily by Curtis (Chris Evans), an intense man in his mid-thirties, his teenage sidekick Edgar (Jamie Bell), and Gilliam (John Hurt), a wizened old geezer who has been receiving secret messages from someone near the front of the train. Like the back-end passengers, we don’t know exactly what is at the front of the train except that life is better there, and one of the film’s chief pleasures is the way director Joon-ho Bong (The Host) creates a sense of linear movement from rear to front, with each car traversed revealing something new, intriguing, infuriating, or just plain weird. Once the revolution begins, the goal is to fight to the front, and we move right along with the scruffy revolutionaries, seeing what they see for the first time as they move ever closer to the front and take control of the train (at least that’s the idea).

Based on a French graphic novel series and adapted by Bong and playwright Kelly Masterson (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead), Snowpiercer is a taut social allegory about class and power cleverly packaged as an exhilarating action thriller. The obviousness of the class divisions, with the rear of the train holding the abused underclass while the successive movement forward reveals more and more of the wealthy and privileged elites, is buoyed by the clever visual design and the manner in which Bong underscores not just disparities of material wealth and comfort, but the ways in which the underclass is purposefully misconstrued for symbolic political value. The poor become a faceless mass to be pitied or despised—either way supporting the value system that allows those in power to revel in their prosperity. The film’s real socio-political kick, though, is the revelation that the two sides are not so much in a power battle as they are mutually dependent, managed with great care by those who would benefit the most from class antagonism. While the film would seem to be most critical of the wealthiest of the wealthy, it also holds plenty of animosity toward those who pretend to care for the poor, but are actually exploiting them to their own ends.

Ever the beleaguered leader, Curtis (well played by Evans, whose buzzed scalp and full beard have him looking far different from his clean-cut Captain America persona) is both wary and thoughtful, characteristics that the eager Edgar studiously lacks. He is smart enough to know that sheer power won’t win the day, even though the revolution requires constant fighting as they move from car to car (in this respect, much like The Raid: Redemption, Snowpiercer has a kind of video game narrative logic, in which success in one train car simply leads to a new challenge in the next). Curtis and his constantly dwindling army of revolutionaries must battle not just armed guards, but a series of locking doors that can only be undone by Namgoong Minsoo (Kang-ho Song), the drug-addled designer of the doors who has been imprisoned on the train (his prison cell is a drawer, as space is at a premium even on a train hundreds of cars long). They are also confronted with the officious rhetoric designed to keep them at bay and rally the pride of the elites, which we hear ad-nauseum from Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton), a bureaucratic emissary from the front of the train who is like an amalgam of every insufferable caricature of British snobbery imaginable, as well as a pretty young teacher (Alison Pill) who fills the heads of the train’s children with self-serving history and quasi-patriotic paeans to the train’s designer, the mysterious Wilford (Ed Harris).

Bong manages a slick balance between the film’s socio-political allegory and its rich visual power, which consistently manages to breathe new life into old action and post-apocalyptic tropes. He keeps the tension high, squeezing each scene for maximum effectiveness, whether it be the terrifying, stomach-dropping moment when Curtis and his fighters realize that the train is about to go into a blackout tunnel and only their adversaries have night-vision goggles, or the lengthy scene in which Curtis unleashes his inner demons and tells Minsoo the horrible truth about his initial months on the train (Harvey “Scissorhands” Weinstein, the film’s U.S. distributor, wanted to slice out 20 minutes and add voice-over, but Bong refused). The film is often brutal, and while there is some respite from the violence (both physical and political), the film is nothing if not relentless, pushing us forward, ever forward, to the front, where the revolutionaries hope to do nothing less than reinvent (what’s left of) human society. That the film manages to end on a vaguely hopeful image, albeit one that follows something close to mass destruction, indicates that Bong is not interested in nihilism and despair, but also that he recognizes that true change usually comes at a high price.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

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Overall Rating: (3.5)




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