[HanCinema's Film Review] "Snowpiercer"

It's a common genre trope for the mean, fascist villains to go into eloquent speeches about how their distorted view of the world is the correct one and that the heroes, in their heroicism, are just futilely striking at cold, hard, reality. In "Snowpiercer" the cold hard reality is the fact that the train is the only place left on Earth that humans can still survive, everything outside having turned into a barren wasteland.

Advertisement

What makes the villains in "Snowpiercer" so effective is that even though they know how important the train is, and have developed all sorts of elaborate equations and procedures built around this mathematical understanding of the world, and use all these facts as justifications for their actions, in reality they're all dogmatists. Not even terribly convincing dogmatists. They can barely go more than a few sentences without contradicting themselves. They speak as if they were orators in a great debate. Yet never spare a moment to actually listen to their own words and realize just how dumb they sound.

As an argument for class-consciousness "Snowpiercer" is astonishingly effective. The battle for the train is not, to the members of the tail-end, any sort of epic statement, but just an effort on their part to avoid being brutalized and humiliated. They stare blankly at the oppressors, never really caring about why the system exists even though that seems to be the only topic of discussion any of the first class passengers want to talk about. Provided they're in the mood for talking, anyway.

For all the film's insistence on elaborate concept it's these down-to-earth qualities that really resonate the best. Absent the bootstraps rhetoric characteristic of so many American films, director Bong Joon-ho builds a movie where the difference between a random foot soldier and a named character really is completely arbitrary, and almost entirely based on circumstance. It's a comically sad commentary how much of a let-down the first class passangers are. There's nothing at all interesting about them except the fact that they're first-class passengers.

Unfortunately, this proves somewhat problematic in storytelling terms. We're not really left with characters so much as we are with simple conceptual representations of the world. They work mainly as ciphers for the concepts that they represent rather than on their own terms. In some sense, it could be argued that the train's management itself causes this by necessity. The people who make the decisions want to be representations of ideals, not actual people, and force the tail end passengers to act in the same way due to this arbitrary insistence on everything being in a divinely appointed place.

I don't know if I'm willing to give the film quite that much credit in storytelling. However we dress it up, this is a story about an armed mob taking over a train one car at a time. It's visually intriguing and evocative and moves at a brisk pace. I can easily forgive a few motivational blank spots when the emphasis is always on the next step forward and whatever horrible existential crisis is behind the next door. "Snowpiercer" isn't exactly a pleasant movie, but it's got plenty of thrills.

Review by William Schwartz

"Snowpiercer" is directed by Bong Joon-ho and features Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Ed Harris and John Hurt.