Runtime: 2 hours, 7 minutes
Rating: R
Director: Joon-Ho Bong
Quick Impressions:
I’ve been hearing good things about Snowpiercer for months and planned to see it back in July, but then my own life got unexpectedly derailed. (See what I did there? That’s a little train humor for you. Not very funny, I’ll admit, but you should probably take what you can get now because this dystopian sci-fi film about the last remnant of humanity ceaselessly circling the frozen Earth on a massive, allegedly self-sustaining train is about the farthest thing from a comedy you’ll see in theaters this summer.)
I haven’t reviewed as many non-kid-friendly films as usual this summer. The thing is, my parents live with us, and normally they stay with our five-year-old on Tuesday nights, so my husband and I can go see a grown-up movie together.
That routine was broken back on July 10, however, when my Dad was taken by ambulance to the transplant hospital in San Antonio where he has remained ever since (a long time, to be sure, but at least he’ll be coming home with a brand new liver). My mother is staying there with him (on a sofa in his room, if you can believe it), and given the heightened stress created by this situation, we didn’t have any desire to leave our daughter with someone else so we could go catch an R-rated movie.
But yesterday, my daughter started kindergarten, so I decided to try to play catch up on movies this week. This review is not exactly timely (although Snowpiercer is still playing in some theaters), but soon I’ll be writing up my look back on the summer, and I have the sense that I need to be looking back over a few more movies than I’ve already seen to make that project worthwhile.
My discovery that Snowpiercer is already available for streaming on Amazon (though not for free) helped me decide to watch it first, and Boyhood sometime in the near future (at least, that’s my current hope).
With my husband silently working in his home office and nobody else in the house, this scheme of streaming a current release from home worked out surprisingly well. And Snowpiercer is as good as I’ve heard (and not quite as bleak and depressing as I’d been led to believe).
The Good:
Now the “quite” there is an important qualifier. Obviously Snowpiercer is going to be bleak and depressing to some degree because it’s dystopian sci-fi, a genre that often lures me in but then crushes my soul to dust and leaves me wishing I had used the time to go outside and plant a tree instead.
Snowpiercer takes place in the aftermath of a focused attempt to counteract global warming that unfortunately turns the entire planet into a sub-freezing glacial wasteland inhospitable to human life. The remnant of humanity continuously circles the globe inside a massive locomotive with a powerful engine that must never stop running and a class system pronounced enough to impress Karl Marx.
It’s good to know this information going in because the movie starts immediately, delivering crucial narrative details during the opening credits which definitely set the tone. Marco Beltrami’s score helps to let us know that we’re in a dystopian wasteland, and the static that crackles over the screen is a nice touch, too.
The first clear image we see lets us know with a visual cue that things are really going downhill for the old human race.
Right away, I felt completely drawn into Snowpiercer’s bleak, richly impoverished world. The characters have so much…character. The make-up and costuming is so vivid and carefully considered that the actors look almost like set dressings. They’re like the larger-than-life characters in a Dickens novel, particularly Tilda Swinton’s Mason, who at times looms so large that I’m amazed that any train can contain her. She’s so intensely consumed with being who she is that at times I expected her to come flying out of the screen and into my living room.
Intelligent, coherent science fiction is remarkably scarce on American movie screens these days. I’m not sure why, but even movies that seem at the outset to have lofty intellectual ambitions (like Prometheus or Elysium) often careen wildly out of control in the final act. (Maybe it’s a bad sign if your dystopian sci-fi is named after a Greek myth. Easily accessible English titles like Snowpiercer, The Hunger Games, and Blade Runner seem to hold up better, perhaps because they’re less prone to collapsing under the burden of their own titular hubris.) (Or perhaps I just liked the sound of that sentence.)
My point is, I was pleased to discover that Snowpiercer isn’t just pseudo-intellectual nonsense trying to seem like highbrow sci-fi. It’s legitimately thoughtful and well-crafted and has more danger of becoming allegory than becoming drivel. (I’m not a fan of allegory, usually, but this works pretty well because it gives us a hero who seems like a real guy to distract us from all the archetypal supporting players.)
Playing the lead character of Curtis, Chris Evans is much growlier here than I’ve ever seen him. At the beginning, he’s on the verge of being Christian Bale’s Batman, but then he tones it down a bit as the movie goes on for some reason. Evans seems to enjoy making artsy sci-fi. Tonally, this film has a lot in common with his earlier project Sunshine, but I think he gives a better performance here. He makes Curtis quite believable, which really matters because it gives us a reason to care. He’s intense, yes, but he also seems relatable to everybody without being generic enough to be only some Everyman.
Jamie Bell and Octavia Spencer also play sympathetic characters who feel quite real and three dimensional (though we also sense that they’re representing a larger and more abstract type). Winning an Oscar has certainly led to better, juicier, more versatile roles for Octavia Spencer. She and Bell are both quite good in this movie.
Also great are Kang-Ho as Namgoong Minsoo and particularly Ah-Song Ko as Yuna.
As the spooky but apparently benevolent Gilliam, John Hurt looks amazingly compelling, oversized spectacles adding layers of character to his gaunt, grimy face.
Very early on, I thought to myself, The premise seems almost allegorical. We’re all on a train together, all trying to get to the front of the train. Only the engineer in a train has agency. Everyone else is just along for the ride. But would you actually call that allegory? The comparison is subtle…
Then Tilda Swinton’s character showed up and dispelled any of my remaining doubts with her seven minute speech.
“We must all of us on this train of life, remain in our allotted station. We must all of us, occupy our preordained position. Would you wear a shoe on your head?” And then later, “I am a hat. You are a shoe. I belong on a head. You belong on a foot.”
She tries to talk to Mr. Wilford, “the divine keeper of the sacred engine,” but can’t get a response. “Oh well, Mr. Wilford is a very busy man. So it is.”
The implication is pretty pointed (maybe even more so because of the punishment meted out to the man with the offending arm). “You can talk to me. Mr. Wilford has no reason to visit here.”
No one can get through to the engineer, and his representative, the minister played by Tilda Swinton is cruel precisely because she seems so officious, detached.
Swinton’s quasi-religious language and the whole spooky vibe of prophecy and conspiracy make the movie’s motives clear, yet at the same time consistently entertain.
This, “Wait for the next red letter” business is pretty easy to watch. Thanks to a very compelling, suspenseful method of presentation, the whole thing manages to be winningly mysterious.
Several lines resonant rather spookily, like, “We control the water, we control the negotiation,” or Yona’s frantic whisper, “Don’t open it.”
This may sound odd, but at many points during the movie, I found myself thinking of The Secret of NIMH. Tonally (and also in terms of mood), Snowpiercer just really has a lot in common with that 1980s animated classic.
I also love the cinematography, and most of the lighting and costuming choices. John Hurt’s oversized eyeglasses should get billing. They have enough character to warrant a credit of their own, and the cinematographer seems to know exactly how to make good use of them.
And—I feel this so strongly, I must say it again—Tilda Swinton is just magnificent. Sometimes her performance is almost too much, but I just can’t knock it because I found it impossible to look away from her. The character she’s playing is so rich and layered and extreme and over-the-top and brilliant, almost Dickensian, larger-than-life.
Best Action Sequence:
The fight scene that begins with a fish is almost mind numbing at first, repetitive, grim, and eerie. But then they come to the bridge. What happens here is so strange. Every society has its rituals, I suppose.
This reminds me quite a bit of reading about wars of the past, when soldiers on the front would stop battle in order to celebrate Christmas.
But what happens after the chilling line, “My friend, you suffer from the misplaced optimism of the doomed,” is truly inventive. It also seems like the height of metaphor, probably even (again) outright allegory.
Tilda Swinton does really fine work in this scene, and the “surrender” bit near the end is pretty fantastic.
Best Scene:
The egg scene is intense, bizarre, and unforgettable.
But Curtis’s talk over a cigarette is definitely gripping and perhaps the most memorable scene of the film.
Best Scene Visually:
I really like the early heart-to-heart on the bunk beds. It’s creatively framed because we’re looking down, and we see Chris Evans and Jamie Bell’s faces pointing in opposite directions
Our last look at the train definitely makes an impression, too.
The Negatives:
This movie is extremely philosophical. It made me think continuously of Foucault (and trust me, that’s not easy to do). I also thought occasionally of Bakhtin, Plato, Camus, The Matrix, and those miniature biodomes we had to make out of three-liter bottles in my high school biology class.
I don’t mind being reminded of great thinkers, but this movie isn’t any too subtle about what it’s getting at. It’s artful. It’s entertaining. But it’s also incredibly pointed. And I sometimes resent that in a movie. I think a truly successful movie would transport me to another level of immersion in the story, and only later would I get an inkling that somebody had been trying to teach me a lesson or present me with a dilemma involving sophisticated ideas.
But that’s maybe just a hang up of mine.
I don’t have any major criticisms of what the movie does give us, though. As long as you know you’re signing up for something extremely philosophical that’s practically outright allegory, then you should be satisfied with what Snowpiercer delivers. Of course, the premise is contrived (but that’s fiction for you).
As the movie goes on, some of the things that happen seem a little weird. And many elements don’t exactly make real-world sense. (I mean, the people in the back of the train are really suffering—sometimes in ways and to a degree that doesn’t quite add up or seem necessary.) But the thing is, making a philosophical point is more important to Snowpiercer than telling a realistic story. Some aspects of the narrative seem almost surreal when you step back and think about them in a real-world kind of way. But Snowpiercer isn’t necessarily trying to tell a realistic story. It’s trying to make a point. If you’re okay with that, then you’ll probably like the movie.
Overall:
Snowpiercer was less depressing than I’d been warned, but just as cold as you would expect. Still, it’s a very good movie, quite artfully and well made with some excellent performances. I’m glad I watched it, and I wish American filmgoers were treated to sci-fi this thoughtful more often.