Snowpiercer
starring Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt and Ed Harris
screenplay by Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson
directed by Bong Joon-ho
Rating: ♦◊◊◊◊
I hesitated renting this DVD for a long time because I worried it was Norwegian, or something, and in a language that I didn’t understand. In addition, the pictures on the case didn’t look overly impressive. It looked like a cheesy movie. And it was. But it wasn’t Norwegian. It is a Korean-American film, about 80% in English, based on Le Transpericeneige by Jacques Ob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette. It’s another example of too many names. What is it with people today that they are so inept with sentences that it takes a whole team to write a novel, or a screenplay, or even a short story? Morons! Too many cooks spoil the broth.
Snowpiercer is a dyspeptic environmental disaster movie set in 2031. Scientific attempts to reverse Global Warming by fiddling with the atmosphere have led, by accident, to a global freeze that extinguishes most life on the planet. All the human survivors live on a train that constantly circumnavigates the globe on a special track. Naturally, unable to escape the confined space people go a little crazy. Then a lot crazy. And then all the old social problems of the human species exist on the train: classism, discontent, slavery, rebellion and revolution. Sex, petty crime and murder too, I guess. The upper class occupies the front of the train while the oppressed masses occupy the rear. Snowpiercer is the story of a successful revolution from the rear. The angry, dirty, starving oppressed fight their way to the engine over a period of days. It’s interesting to see what they encounter in each section as they move forward, particularly for me as a person who likes the VIA Rail long-distance, cross-country sleeper train in Canada.
There`s also something going on here about Man and the Machine. In Snowpiercer the train is the savior of humanity and some part of the population have deified the train`s inventor (Ed Harris) and the train itself as some kind of divine thing. This relationship of Man and Machine is a recurring story line. Other famous examples might be Charlie Chaplin`s Modern Times (1936), and Paul Verhoeven`s Robocp (1987, re-made in 2014 by José Padilha).