Cast: Chris Evans, Ed Harris, and Tilda Swinton
Director: Bong Joon-ho
126 minutes (15) 2013
Lions Gate Blu-ray region B
[Released 25th May]
Rating: 8/10
Review by Christopher Geary
Adapted from Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette’s French graphic
novel, Le Transperceneige (first
published 1982; English version The
Escape, 2014), this sci-fi adventure by Korean director Bong Joon-ho
(monster movie The Host, Oscar-winner
Parasite) might have been rather
weird art-house fare. Instead we get an exciting bundle of hugely enjoyable imaginative
action and spectacular thrills, combined with dry black-comedy showcasing several
oddly compelling characters. Apart from recalling several movies also set on rails, like Andrei
Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train (1985), originally
written by Akira Kurosawa, perhaps the most notable genre influence on Snowpiercer, as a post-apocalypse drama
about a quirkily 'futuristic' society in a frozen landscape, is Robert Altman’s Quintet (1979), starring Paul
Newman.
The introduction laments how a ‘CW-7’ solution to climate
change only results in an ice-bound planet. Now it’s 2031 on the Rattling Ark where
non-stop travel pays “homage to the Sacred Engine” as Curtis (Chris Evans)
leads a desperate rebellion against rationing for lowly survivors trapped in filthy
overcrowded slums of the refuge train’s tail section, while parasitic rulers
horde mankind’s final resources in ultimate luxury in many forward carriages. Being
in constant motion, even heroically inclined stereotypes find that human memory
fades, and the poor have accepted their fate, until several daring questions
are asked. Little boy Timmy is taken away by armed security, and this kidnapping
prompts a revolution. Gilliam (John Hurt) represents the spirit of resistance,
while on the other side, Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton, gamely doing a
Yorkshire accent), champions the tyranny of elitism.
The ultra-violence of revolt kicks off just in time for the
Snowpiercer’s 18th anniversary, when Curtis proves that bullying police have no
bullets in their guns. Advancing through one railway carriage at a time, pockets
of social privilege and exclusivity are revealed in zones of hellish discovery where
tunnel-darkness is lit only by fire. The rebels cling to a forlorn hope that if
“we control the water, we control the negotiation” but not everything here is
what it seems. Into this sustainable and ecologically balanced microcosm, where
surrealist wonders of greenhouse, aquarium, and school-room, co-exist with many
other box-cars, serving every ironic or decadent need from sauna to disco, iconic
fanatic Curtis and his equally frantic supporters challenge the status quo that
has stagnated into gross normality, while the engine rumbles on through graveyard
cities, apparently without any hope.
With fairy-tale ambiguity exploring class warfare, the
train’s designer and chief driver is ‘benevolent’ dictator and divinely ‘merciful’
Wilford (Ed Harris, great as ever), happily inviting surviving hero Curtis to a
melodramatic dinner, where his Bond style villainy can explain this hideous master-plan, while former cannibal Curtis is forced to admit: “I know that
babies taste best.” Humanity is revealed as both brutal curse and supreme
promise, primed for an exploding tragedy like a stylised disaster movie emerging from a time-capsule chrysalis. As profoundly farcical, amusingly compromised, socio-political
allegory of holocaust absurdity, Snowpiercer
offers a stark and timely reminder, albeit buried in grimly vicarious chills of 'lockdown' isolationism and privileged exclusivity, that we all have really wasted most
of the last 20 years.
