[Re-posted from 2017]
I recently re-watched Snowpiercer with my boyfriend and former roommate the other night on Hulu Plus, and I was once again struck by how director Bong Joon-ho made his interpretation of the French comic book Le Transperceneige both immensely entertaining in a mainstream way as well as thought-provoking. Snowpiercer was out on limited-release this summer due to conflicts between the director and the distribution company (supposedly, the director wanted to keep an extra 20 minutes that the distributor wanted to lop off), but don't be fooled by its relative obscurity in the U.S. - it's got an all-star cast. An almost unrecognizable Chris Evans stars as revolutionary leader, Curtis, who plans a rebellion to take control the perpetual-motion engine of the train hurtling across the frozen Earth holding the last of humanity after a climate experiment gone wrong. Along the way, he picks up allies such as Tanya (Octavia Spencer), Namgoong Minsoo (Kang-ho Song), and Yona (Ah-sung Ko) to fight against the mysterious train conductor/inventor Wilford (Ed Harris) and his cronies.
Snowpiercer is one of those movies where it's fun to pick at the multitude of metaphors placed throughout the film and try your hand at divining the director's intentions. Most obvious is the metaphor of the train as the division of social classes. The have-nots possess the dirty, crowded tail cars while the haves enjoy saunas, sushi, and wild parties towards the front. However, even here, I was pleasantly surprised. Given the audience, I would have expected the train to reflect a somewhat more meritocratic or capitalistic social system as seen in the U.S. and Europe. For example, doctors in the front and manual laborers in the back. In fact, the social system is more similar to a Buddhist or Hindu caste system, perhaps due to the director's Korean roots, as proclaimed in henchman Mason's (Tilda Swinton) speech: "Order is the barrier that holds back the flood of death. We must all of us on this train of life remain in our allotted station. We must each of us occupy our preordained particular position."
From what I've read, Bong Joon-ho, who also directed the South Korean film The Host, tends to weave environmental messages into his films. In this film, he does a masterful job of enclosing ecosystems within ecosystems. There is the despoiled ecosystem outside the train - the frozen tundra created by human arrogance. The train also contains agricultural trains and in one scene, the tail car rebels walk through an aquarium car complete with a sushi bar. But, even beyond the ecosystems of life, there is also an ecosystem of human emotion that Wilford carefully cultivates on the train, "...we need to maintain a proper balance of anxiety and fear, chaos and horror, in order to keep life going. And if we don't have that, we need to invent it." It is an interesting observation that humans need emotional outlets, even if those emotions are not always good or beneficial. However, given that this statement is spoken by the villain of the film, it makes you wonder if these violent emotional outlets are truly necessary or merely the manipulations of a maniacal control freak.
By the way, I have to mention Tilda Swinton's incredible performance. Wow. She, too, is barely recognizable, and her portrayal of Minister Mason is a complete transformation of her actual self. I wanted to watch her films before this movie, but now I need to watch her movies.
There are many other interesting themes that pop up throughout the film that I won't go too far into: the portrayal of Wilford as an cold and unsympathetic industrialist, a lovely foray into the power of propaganda in a totalitarian government, thoughts about morality and whether good people can do bad things and bad people can do good things, the questions as to whether leaders are responsible for the actions of their underlings, the nature of betrayal, the extinction of humans and machines, and also #firstworldproblems. There's also some interesting commentary on drugs and addiction. Bong Joon-ho really fits a lot of stuff in here! Sometimes though, there is a little too much explanation of the various themes by the characters. There were definitely a few times I wanted to throttle the director and shout, "WE KNOW. We can read between the lines. STOP TALKING ABOUT IT."
Despite all the philosophizing, Snowpiercer is very much an action film. There is plenty of hand-to-hand fighting, gun fights, spectacular explosions, and heart-wrenching deaths. As with Game of Thrones, no one is safe from being killed off! With only a few exceptions (Why would you shoot a gun out a window towards another train car several thousand feet away? There's no way your bullets would reach the other car unless you had a really high-powered rifle. Which the characters don't have. *sigh*), the action scenes are satisfactorily logical and you can quite easily suspend disbelief. My boyfriend liked the movie well enough, and I enjoyed how it wasn't just another dumb action film pretending to be smart (Total Recall remake, anyone?).
Suitably, the movie ends on a vague and open-ended note. Some reviewers have commented that one's interpretation of the ending is very much a litmus test of one's own personal outlook on life. Are you an optimist or a pessimist?
4/5 stars. Definitely worth 2 hours of your life.
