Snowpiercer

Snowpiercer originally started off as a French graphic novel published in 1982 and was created by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette. Going by the name ‘Le Transperceneige’ (also known as The Snowfall), it was a post-apocalyptic climate fiction story which spanned over four volumes (including a prequel volume), making the series last as long as 2019. Eventually earning itself enough of a following, the graphic novel got picked up for a movie version and Korean director, Bong Joon Ho, who had previously directed movies like The Host and Mother, was chosen to lead the project. Loving the story of the graphic novel, he took it upon himself to construct the graphic novel’s narrative into something more fitting for a cinematic viewing, with the eventual release of the film in 2013 resulting in enough buzz to turn this small graphic novel into a still niche, but more well-known brand. After an environmental catastrophe causes a new ice age, the last remaining humans are crammed into a 1,000 car-long circumnavigational train called The Snowpiercer, which consists of several different sections which determines the status and living standards of the passengers. At the end of the train (also known as the tail) live the incredibly poor squalid residents while the rich live it up in the upper-most trains. This life of negligence, lack of food and constant abuse from armed soldiers, eventually causes an uprising, led by Curtis Everett (played by Chris Evans). Hoping to reach the engine of the train to confront the creator who the denizens call Mr Wilford (played by Ed Harris), Curtis and a team from the tail including Curtis’ mentor, Gilliam (played by John Hurt), Curtis’ second-in-command, Edgar (played by Jamie Bell) and Tanya (played by Octavia Spencer), a mother wishing to find her son who was taken to the upper areas of the train to be indoctrinated, make their way forward, later joined by other tortured individuals on the train including train specialist, Namgoong Minsoo (played by Song Kang-ho), his clairvoyant daughter, Yona (played by Go Ah-sung). With this team, they face down whoever gets in their way to reach the front of this massive machine and see if they can force change on this horrible living situation. Being met with critical acclaim upon release, remaining one of the most expansive South Korean films with a budget of $40 million, and being one of the first movies that got Joon-ho’s name out to other countries, Snowpiercer does its best to create a brand-new story out of this idea with the talent that it clearly has. It’s an imperfect movie with things that don’t work about it, but the passion can be felt when watching.

Since the original concept comes from a graphic novel (an international one at that) and takes a much longer time to flesh out its ideas and story beats, clearly certain things have to be changed in order to make it work on a cinematic level. The decision to drastically change the goal and direction of the story is a bit of a strange one as that veers into the areas of complete overhaul and runs the risk of messing up the direction a specific piece of content was leading towards. This is kind of what happens however, as going from a more destruction of common peace and order into a rebellion style story against a domineering tyrannical rule doesn’t quite function well within the framework of this narrative. Bong Joon-ho has proved himself to be a very talented directed and clearly has a love for portraying the corruption of political powers and the toxic nature among class social systems but placing that type of story in this environment takes away more than what it should give. The premise could offer up a lot, with its Noah’s Ark type of set-up along with the separation of passengers depending on class leaves the door open for several interesting stories to be tackled that involve conspiracies, hostile takeovers, the future of humanity, etc., but a lot of this script written by Jong-ho and Kelly Masterson just seems a little lost.  By making the plot of the film such a bare-bones basic good vs bad story, it takes away that feeling of moral ambiguity that this environment is clearly fit for and makes the world they create nowhere near as interesting. This isn’t to say that the movie is entirely covering over blanket characters with morally grey attributes, but it’s clearly not the main focus and come the end of the film, what could be an interesting ambiguous conclusion with no clear good or bad guy, instead makes it very obvious who’s in the right and who’s in the wrong from the movie’s viewpoint. It’s not ever fully made clear what the end goal for the revolutionary people is, the trek up to the front of the train doesn’t feature many unique moments, so it can get a little repetitive after a while, and everything interesting about this story and train has nothing to do with the characters of focus, so it feels like the movie is holding the intrigue hostage from its audience. It’s a decently paced and directed movie, but it clearly needed to rethink where to take its story because it doesn’t make it come across as unique as Joon-ho is used to directing.

The characters from the tail section of the train are not interesting focuses for the audience to follow for the movie. They have the sympathy points for being trapped in a bad situation against a cruel system which is always an easy tool for sympathy, but in spite of this obvious gimme, it doesn’t work as within this world and with how the system has been set up, it doesn’t correlate with how single-minded their motivation is and how uninteresting a lot of the individual characters are in general. They just seem like people who want better than what they have, but when their plan involves mowing down everybody else who got on the train legally to escape the exact same fate regardless of how innocent or guilty, they are, it doesn’t make them look that sympathetic. If the film took more of a morally grey look at both sides, this could work and highlight both the problems with a domineering governmental system and an anarchistic mob fighting the power, but that isn’t allowed and the audience is just supposed blindly like the tail side just because they’re in a bad situation, which is made even harder when the higher-class people are honestly more enjoyable to watch. Tilda Swinton’s corrupt political honcho as well as an overly cheery kindergarten teacher played by Alison Phil showing the kids the ”true way” to live on the train led to the more interesting elements of the movie and moments that could have been more frequent if we weren’t stuck with these bland revolutionary characters. The richer side are taking advantage of the unique situation and world they’ve created, whilst the leads feel like they could be from any other post-apocalyptic revolution story. They’re not painful to be around, but they are the least interesting characters in this movie. Everybody’s acting is pretty good, especially with credit to Evan’s final speech being very well handled, and Tilda Swinton clearly having a fun time as the obviously bought-out Margaret Thatcher type role, but it’s hard to pretend like the lack of interest in their characters hurts how much we remember them in the process. Since the tail is so bland, great actors like Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer and the late great John Hurt do good jobs, but just don’t have much to work with.

For what this movie could do with its visuals, they can either by done very subtly or very bombastically. They could be laced with intricate design and extravagant coloration to make each section of the train unique from look alone, or they could have them look mostly authentic to real-life environments but feature in hidden corruptness through the character dialogue or camera work. The movie decides to do a bit of an in-between; featuring some pretty glamorous looking environments but doesn’t stay too long in them and mostly leaving the subtext to be discovered later. The train is honestly not that well built-up despite the pretty nicely handled opening sequence showing off the train’s method of picking lower-class to use as labor, the punishments for disobeying orders, and the limited rations they have in both food and in bullets. When the audience see the train and the production design by Ondrej Nekvasil, it’s nothing note-worthy and it doesn’t help that a lot of the movie is shot in the dark. Using that lighting for mood is fine in certain moments, but the extent of it to the point where nothing is shown isn’t that great a plot device. The action can also be pretty overblown in a story that really doesn’t require that much of it; the weird usage of slow-mo and graphic imagery feels like its wasting time on something that needs to be a bit quieter and more thoughtful. When it does that, its passable and mostly held together by decent writing and good acting, but this aggressive feeling that comes from the action doesn’t add a lot. The fact that a majority of the movie didn’t use CG besides any outside shots does come across when you literally seen the train cars, they made specially made for the actors to walk around in.

Despite all the negatives that were just listed, Snowpiercer is really not as bad as you would think. It’s true these problems are noticeable, and they stop the movie from being the incredibly complex and morally grey story that the concept is begging to be, but its thankfully not a bad sit to get through, it just slowly folds away until the final act peters out any last element of intrigue the story originally had. The actors are good, some scenes show and mention some interesting elements, and you can feel the effort that went into it, but it just needed a different direction. There was a Netflix show created about Snowpiercer made in 2020 starring Daveed Diggs and Jennifer Connolly, and while that also struggles with bland and even more unlikeable revolutionary characters going up against the much more compelling upper-class passengers, that one does at least feature the other more complicated elements that take advantage of its concept (at least originally before also trailing off to complete idiocy that makes this film look better by comparison). Not a terrible sit, but if you want to see something that really mixes deep character with social commentary and interesting visuals, go watch any of Bong Joon-Ho’s other movies.