"Snowpiercer" (2014)

Snowpiercer is director Joon-ho Bong’s first English language feature after four features made in South Korea. Often times when a foreign director makes a film using the larger budgets of a Hollywood studio, their vision doesn’t translate well. This is typically, though not always, due to the studio interfering and taking away a lot of the distinctive flavors that made the director so fascinating to watch and so worthy of backing with more sizable funding. Snowpiercer is a rarity in that nothing has really been lost in translation. But that has been at a price: The film has been a much discussed subject recently as the Weinstein Co. asked for twenty minutes to be cut; eventually due to backlash the film was released as the director intended but by a boutique company, Radius, owned by Weinstein, with a much smaller theatrical output. If you’re going to see it, and you should, you’re probably going to see it on demand (Though you should check out your listings to see if it’s playing nears you, on the off chance it is). The fight might have cost eyes seeing Bong’s vision but that vision -- offbeat, delirious, striking -- deserves to be seen.

Snowpiercer is a blunt metaphor in the guise of a sharp action thriller. Its plot is almost entirely symbolic of a class struggle, and yet Bong invests it with such an idiosyncratic vitality that it never feels like its beating you over the head with its underlying messages about the broken, entrenched class divide. This begins with its strange, fantastical vision: in a not so distant post-apocalyptic world, spurred on by failures to combat climate change, the remnants of humanity live in the titular train, which protects them from the deadly subzero temperatures that have engulfed the planet; the Snowpiercer circles the planet, completing its journey once a year. The train uses its compartments to literally compartmentalize, placing the haves in the front and the have-nots in the back. 

The members at the back of the train are planning a revolt, headed by none other than Captain America himself, Chris Evans. Revolts have failed in the past, but they are certain it will succeed this time because they know where the tech-savvy creator of the train’s lock systems (Bong regular Song Kang-ho, who uses a nifty translator in order to speak in Korean; he’s joined by a female partner in crime played by Go Ah-sung) is, stowed away in the train’s prison – designed like the filing system of a morgue. A kink is thrown in the plan when it seems like their best bet is a drug addict, hooked on Kronole, what amounts to hardened industrial fuel. Song and Go’s character’s become the film’s soul, finding wonder and beauty in the midst of gripping agony and loss while others fail to stop and appreciate how the world still thrives even in damnation. 

The rest of the cast is rounded out with a murderer’s row of actors, including Octavia Spencer, Jamie Bell, and William Hurt as lower class revolutionaries, and Tilda Swinton as a Margaret Thatcher-like (in deeply unsettlingly conservative politics as much as toadie, toad-like appearance) second in command sent out by the ominously mentioned conductor of the train Mr. Wilford – he seems to have essentially developed a cult of personality through conscientiously deployed propaganda and indoctrination. The film is an international co-production that feels that internationality, boasting a consciously diverse international cast. 

With each new train compartment, Bong comes up with another distinctive setting; the train cars don’t blend together, though there’s a fluid logic to their order. Painstaking set design is put into each so that they all have a personality; crafted with tiny, thoughtful detail. The earlier cars are grimy and dirty, industrial and worn; Bong makes sly distinctions through careful aesthetic choices, such as the way he dresses characters -- the clothing of the upper class figures gratingly pop, and flow with curved angles. As the rebels fight their way up to the front, Bong becomes ever more creative, providing us with cars we might not have anticipated and using them to provide us with tremendous amounts of information about this world’s past and the rationale of the system.    

Bong knows how to choreograph an action sequence and utilizes the tight spaces to add to and enhance the action. There is more than one moment where the rebels enter a new cart facing a crowd of thugs and have to face off because there is simply nowhere else to go but forward. Bong and Kelly Masterson’s script take advantage of this by constantly keeping the story moving forward and never providing a chance for you to question some of the implausibility of all of this. It isn’t necessarily meant to make literal sense but works, instead, in a heightened, florid manner. 

At times, the film is brimming with countless ideas, as if it wasn’t entirely sure it would be able to manage to fit them all in. It never settles to solely be a metaphor but a kickass thriller as well, and a weird sci-fi techno- and ideo-scape. At times, this can be exhausting, and by its end it seems to dare itself to consider one heady conceptual argument too many (It’s both a cynical film and a hopeful one – and that isn’t a contradiction: that middle ground is what makes progress take so damn long). But the film is also invigorating; it is quite unlike anything else, and that makes it delightful and infectious, as if it’s getting away with something a little more audacious than it is. 

Bleak and, at times, bracing as the film’s story is, a dark strand of humor runs throughout ensuring it never spills over into something truly morbid. This comes out in little character details (Swinton and Song really play up their characters to joyous effect) and little bits of absurdism that double down on how unrealistic and bizarre the film’s premise is. The film’s abundance of imagination also helps steer it into more charming and whimsical territory – a number of the carts are little tossed off jokes that leaven things in between the brutal, close quarter fisticuffs. 

The film’s metaphor is transparent, but it’s also subtler than it initially appears to be. It isn’t just about oppression of the poor or the rigidity of the class system. The film is interested in the ways and reasons we maintain such a lousy capitalist system. The ways ideology is translated through generations and the ways those in power ensure that no one rises up, because that wouldn’t benefit them. The way capitalism and consumerism, and their inherent class struggles, have become our religion (The engine and the conductor are referred to in hushed terms of religiosity). The crucial role the education system has in perpetuating problems. The way we ensure that working class people self-police themselves, assuming it’s their own responsibility for circumstances that are systemic. Perhaps the film’s most interesting question is why the system remains in place, why we can’t see outside or beyond it towards a better possible future – people think they’ll be figuratively “left out in the cold” as much as literally.      

Like Bong’s previous efforts (Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother), the director uses genre elements to ask and consider things far more reaching and meaningful than those genres might suggest possible. Bong wants to tell a good, energizing story, but he also seems intent on refusing to settle for simple, or “good enough”. His films are about the failures of societies and families, and especially individuals; people haunted by actions taken and untaken, wishing they could go back to a time before the events of the film. They dig themselves deeper into quagmires (both literal and emotional) of their own making; but they also refuse to allow themselves to be put down and that makes us root for them. They fight to the bitter end, even if that ending might be as bad in its own way as the present situation. What matters is the fighting, whether you’re fighting a lost cause or not – you have to try at least, bullet train in a post-apocalyptic tundra or not.

Grade: A-