SNOWPIERCER
DIRECTOR: Joon-ho Bong
CAST: Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, Ed Harris, John Hurt, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer
CLASSIFICATION: 16 LV
RUNNING TIME: 126 minutes
RATING: ****
STYLISHLY crafted while still paying attention to character development and moving the narrative forward, Snowpiercer is as good an action movie as it is an allegory about class, power structures and power run amok.
It is also nothing like what you think it is going to be.
People segue off into philosophical discussions and beauty is discovered in unlikely corners. Nasty brutality is meted out by uniformed guards with guns and Tilda Swinton channelling Maggie Thatcher makes scary speeches about how you poor people should just be grateful for what us rich people allow you.
It’s like real life, only playing out on a futuristic fast-moving train that doesn’t stop, with the kind of meticulous art direction and costuming real life only finds in a glossy magazine.
Initially slow burning, Joon-ho Bong’s dystopian sci-fi speeds up halfway and eventually creates something that is very different to current post-dystopian action fare out there. It’s not led by teenagers, but by Captain America himself (bodes well for Marvel’s putative Civil War-tinged storyline when they enter phase three).
After an experiment with the weather goes wrong, the world settles into a permafrost and the only survivors are the people on a train going round and round Asia and Europe. Seventeen years have passed and life as we knew it has gone.
Evans is Curtis, a nobody who lives at the back of the train, who sweeps his way towards the front, intent on confronting the master of the train who controls life as they know it.
He is joined by a drug-addled tech specialist, Namgoong Minsu (Song Kang-ho), who knows how to open the doors but has his own agenda. They’re trailed by a dwindling band of highly motivated individuals who include Namgoong’s daughter, Yona (Go Ah-sung), who may or may not be just a little bit fey.
There’s enthusiastic sidekick Edgar (Bell) and no-nonsense Tanya (Spencer) who just wants to find her cute little son. Then there’s Gilliam (Hurt), the old leader who hands the baton to Curtis.
Characters’ back stories slowly unfold – the reason for Curtis’s unease with leadership is slowly teased out of him and we learn more about Gilliam’s questionable motivation from unlikely sources.
But it is once they meet the wizard at the front of the train, Harris as Wilford, that we really start questioning whether the status quo is a fix or not.
This tale plays on the concept of gaining momentum as you hurtle forward, but get nowhere slowly, while moving faster and faster. The train is motivated by a perpetual motion engine, and people are alive because of it, but no one is truly living. Life is controlled to the extreme, and stagnant as a result.
Each train carriage unfolds a different aspect of the lives of humanity’s last remaining survivors of a failed ecological experiment, but also references different concepts like education as a brainwashing tool, regulation of food resources to dominate or the use of psychotropic drugs to control.
The over-arching idea of how and why this train works could be pulled apart very quickly by a sci-fi nut, but the reason it works is because within this hermetically sealed environment these particular characters and their reactions are believable.
It is all quite batty, but it works because it is a idiosyncratic vision with a distinctive personality. The director kept control of his idea, curtailed himself to this particular story and kept control over the distribution of the final production.
It is the story of human reaction to huge forces: how Curtis and his friends respond to what happens on the train makes you question how you respond (or don’t) to the very same things happening right now, just without the sci-fi feel.
If you liked The Host or Ender’s Game you will like this.