Snowpiercer Film Review
It’s been a while since I watched a film and felt I could give it a hearty thumbs up at the end. Lately I’ve been especially disappointed with films released in the U.S. (looking at you, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Transcendence, and Godzilla!) that scatter their kernels of great ideas to the wind of Middle American ignorance at the expense of the rest of us. Perhaps I should just stop going to big summer movies altogether and stick with my more favored indie and foreign fare at the Spokane gem, the Magic Lantern Theater, since when I do I’m often rewarded with an inventive and thoughtful film like Snowpiercer.
Sci-fi stands out as my favorite genre and it’s safe to say that this is a piece with solid staying power and ideas that will influence the genre over decades to come. The film is based on a 1970’s French graphic novel by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette called Le Transperceniege and explores a future world where all human life is limited to the passengers on a perpetually moving train after a failed climate change mitigation experiment plunges Earth into an ice age. The social stratification on the train mimics the caste systems of civilization with the suffering masses at the back and the pampered elite riding near to the engine enjoying schools, dance clubs, and greenhouse-grown citrus.
For those who haven’t seen the film, the action follows a reluctant revolutionary as he plots a takeover of the train’s engine. Curtis (Chris Evans) tells the audience and his rebellious cohorts that “…all past revolutions have failed because they didn’t take the engine.” The engine in this case is literally what keeps the dregs of humanity still surviving alive and moving on their endless circuit around the globe. Reading Snowpiercer as a direct allegory of our current financial, cultural, or governmental “engines” is a bit misleading because of this key difference. While the state, capitalists, and the project of civilization itself may claim to be all that’s keeping humanity from mass death, history and logic illuminate the less-than-sterling credibility of these claims.
For me, the highlight of the film came in an early scene. Minister Mason’s (Tilda Swinton) duty calls her back to the tail of the train to quell an impending riot and a shoe is lobbed toward her. I deeply hope that this is an homage to the infamous George W. Bush shoe dodge. Her lecture that follows– “this is size 10 chaos!”–is a comical version of every hierarchy’s argument in support of itself. Speaking to the mostly adult crowd as though they were children, she asked in a stern singsong, “Would you wear a shoe on your head?”. The stark setting and all-or-nothing terms of life hammer home the mantra of the upper classes, translated through the minister, “Order holds back the frozen death.” Later, we see that the children of the upper classes are being taught the same lesson in song: to worship order and its enforcers.
Aside from Swinton, who is always a scene stealer in my book, the strong points of the film are its performances (Ah-sung Ko as Yona and John Hurt as Gilliam stand out especially) and its visual styling. Since the viewer begins the film with limited knowledge of the train, we share in the awe that the revolutionaries experience as they fight their way to the front and drab, crowded cars give way to cheerful schoolrooms, peaceful gardens, and glamorous bars. The camerawork and photography are dazzling as well, particularly considering the limitations of such tight quarters. The film is violent, but mostly in a purposeful way that I seldom found gratuitous.
Snowpiercer is not a perfect film by any means and did have some plot holes and inconsistencies that bothered me. The true nature of the revolution and Gilliam’s role in working with the engine master seemed improbable and out of place with what we knew of his character. The sad and beautiful story that Curtis explains near the end after earlier asking Gilliam, “How can I be a leader when I have two arms?” loses its punch when we find that Gilliam’s compassionate action years before was part of a counter-revolutionary plot all along. This could be a deeper layer of consistency rather than a plot hole, meant to show the thorough nature of the system’s ability to create the illusion of progress while maintaining the status quo.
In a similar vein, the introductory claim that “all life went extinct” is a broad one and falls apart when we are shown the polar bear at the end of the film. Again though, this could be a meta-example of the theme of power and access to information. We depend on that claim in the same way that the travelers depend on the claim that they’d die outside (also from above) to shape their reality. The polar bear at the end could symbolize the idea that we’ve both (the audience and the train riders) been duped by our leaders intentionally, but part of me doubts that the thinking was that layered in this film. I am just a bit of a paranoid nut about these things.
This multi-layered speculation leads me to the argument that my husband and I had on the way home from the theater: was the film a cautionary tale about knowing your place or a broader implication of strict hierarchies and the chaos that they create? I argued for the latter, pointing out that everything could have been avoided at multiple junctures had humans not been locked into stratified social arrangements–from civilization-triggered climate change itself, to the misguided use of atmospheric engineering to address it, to the distribution of resources on the train after the disaster. I saw a lot of small nods to this theory, most notably the polar bear’s appearance at the end, indicating that things were not as they seemed and that nature was operating on a different continuum than human error.
I watched with a friend who kept telling me that I needed to make an assessment based on what was actually in the film rather than in my own analysis around its edges, which is fair. The way he saw the film, the revolution fails because the system is set up for people to fail and the message communicated is, simply, don’t try because you’ll fail, our best hope is to struggle in an imperfect world. This is a message that he found unacceptable, and so do I, when I hear it expressed in real life by people justifying the systems we endure today. Is it just because I want to like the film that I didn’t see that? Do I, as Tilda Swinton’s character accuses, “suffer from the misplaced optimism of the doomed”? What do you think?
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