SNOWPIERCER: Crazy Train

Director: Bong Joon-ho
Writers: Bong Joon-ho, Kelly Masterson
Cast: Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho, Ko Ah-sung, John Hurt, Ed Harris, Tilda Swinton, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer
Runtime: 126 mins.
2014 (2013 in South Korea)

In the online film community that I haunt, there has been a lot of rumbling about people going to the wrong movies. Or rather, that rumbling always exists, it has just been exacerbated recently by a few factors. Between the movie you came here to read about, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and the excellent Edge of Tomorrow (as well as the much-hyped forthcoming Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Guardians of the Galaxy, and Mockingjay: Part 1), 2014 is turning out to be a banner year for mainstream sci-fi films--and yet, everybody and their reluctant mother is going to see the predictably steaming pile that is Transformers: Age of Indistinction.

That is why my goal in writing this particular review is to mobilize you to get out and go see Snowpiercer, a film that you likely haven't heard anything about, except perhaps snippets here and there: whispers in dark alleys, notes passed under restroom stalls, covert communiqués exchanged away from the watchful eyes of the Transformers marketing campaign.

In the world of Snowpiercer, the Earth has succumbed to a new ice age, brought about by humanity futzing with the atmosphere in an effort to counteract global warming. Now everything is dead. Cue the Snowpiercer, a massive train that contains the only remaining human life. It operates as a self-contained ecosystem that circles the entire globe once per year. All is not well on the so-called Rattling Ark, however. Our protagonists live in squalor in the tail of the train, cut off from the relative comfort and prosperity of the front-dwellers by a series of gates and armed guards. The gates only open once per day, for about four seconds, to allow the delivery of the nasty looking protein blocks that sustain the lives of the tailies. Guess what, though? Our hero, Curtis (Chris Evans), is planning a revolution! If our ragtag band of misfits can unite in order to press forward, and if they can wrest control of the Eternal Engine (that which sustains all life on the train) from the industrial despot Wilford, then they will have all the bargaining chips necessary to upset the established order.

But that's just the beginning. What sounds like a familiar plot opens out and contorts in all manner of unexpected ways--without ever leaving the cramped confines of the train.



You should know that Snowpiercer is the first English language film from Korean director Bong Joon-ho, and it plays like a twisted version of The Hunger Games combined with something like Oldboy (itself a rather deranged Korean film). Interestingly, both of those stories were predated by the French graphic novel that inspired Snowpiercer, Le Transperceneige, which in turn was predated by that iconic Ozzy Osbourne song.*

You should also know that the film's American distributor, The Weinstein Company, tried its damnedest to ruin Snowpiercer for us. According to this rather cynical blurb, Harvey Weinstein did not think the director's cut of Snowpiercer, that which was released in South Korea, would be palatable to us simpleminded Americans. He wanted to screw around with the movie and cut it down, likely removing all the parts that make it Magic and Excellent. The good news is, the above blurb guessed incorrectly--Bong Joon-ho fought back and managed to acquire an American release for his film in its original form. The bad news is, the film was given a very limited release as punishment for its integrity, initially opening in only eight theaters across the nation.  All that is to say, you might have trouble finding it in a theater near you.

What exactly is it about this movie that had the Weinsteins so scared? The plot summary sounds like a smash hit; what could be construed as "inaccessible" to American audiences?

On the one hand, I have no idea. This film is a beautiful, taut thriller. The action is incendiary, and the scope is epic. Perhaps it was the fact that a decent portion of the movie's dialogue was spoken by non-white actors, occasionally in Korean (with subtitles), that rustled the Weinsteins' jimmies... but how can you worry about the bankability of the performers when your protagonist is superstar white male American actor Chris Evans, potentially one of the finest leading men of our generation, coming off the smash Marvel movie hit Captain America: The Winter Soldier? It boggles the mind.

On the other hand... I understand their hesitation. Snowpiercer, it turns out, is a weird movie. I wish I could start listing off the absurd moments, but I don't want to spoil anything. Suffice it to say that during one hectic action scene, Curtis slips on a fish and falls down. This isn't played for laughs, either--it heightens tension. Another example: where else will you find a movie in which the severing of limbs isn't just something that happens--it's a motif?

The most abnormal aspect of Snowpiercer (perhaps the aspect the Weinsteins opposed) is its liberal mixing and mashing of different tones. Playing with tone is one of the most dangerous and rewarding tools a filmmaker has at her disposal. Viewing audiences often don't realize it, but we are subliminally hypersensitive to tone shifts. We expect action movies to feel like action movies, romantic comedies to hit the proper romantic comedy beats, etc. Our subconscious understanding of genre is crucial to our viewing experience. That's why Space Jam didn't end with the grisly murder of Michael Jordan and why the next Mission Impossible movie won't conclude with everyone getting married. Those things just don't make sense. And when we as an audience are presented with tonal shifts, they violate our expectations and make us uncomfortable. This can lead to some of the most gratifying experiences (the unexpected latecoming dramatic scenes in Shaun of the Dead), or some of the lamest (a particularly unsubtle example being how many people felt cheated by the end of The Village). So often tonal shifts wreak havoc on our experience of the film, and we just chalk it up to plot holes, or bad acting, or some other such easy but misguided target.

Snowpiercer owns its tonal weirdness, using it as a tactic to sidestep cliche and take the most direct route to what it is trying to accomplish. The movie, for example, is very funny. But the humor does not function like typical action-thriller comic relief, the kind we are overfamiliar with at this point, the kind that we've seen in Jurassic Park and The Lord of the Rings and Batman Begins and everything Marvel has made. That kind of movie uses comedy as a sort of release valve--when the pressure rises, throw in a joke to cut the tension. It's a good tactic that, when done well, makes the joke funnier and the suspense more gratifying. Snowpiercer does not use this tactic. Instead, at no point in the movie did my laughter dispel the tension of the scene. Rather, each comic beat enhances and intensifies the stakes of any given moment. Every single facet of this movie is aimed towards sending the narrative barreling forward towards its ultimate goal--the Eternal Engine--and whatever is to be found there. Even the humor.

I need to take this segue to talk about one of the most ostentatious oddities I've seen in any film of recent memory: Tilda Swinton. She plays Prime Minister Mason, who is by all accounts a sinister antagonist, but a relentlessly comic one. Her performance constantly approaches unrelatable levels of theatricality, only to be brought crashing into meaningfulness by a moment of pathos. She is both a caricature of herself and a living breathing person with the kind of depth that keeps caricatures awake at night. She struts, flaunts, lisps, grovels, and lectures her way through this movie with a certain maniacal elegance. Her performance doesn't break the world--it forms the world around her. Deforms it, rather.

Consider this performance as against Evans' performance, which is steeped in the kind of naturalism you would expect from a serious Oscar contender. The fact that these two characters and these two actors, with their wildly disparate registers of performance, can occupy the same scene--and that it can feel so right--is a marvel. Hell, just look at them.

They aren't the only well-matched pair, either. Snowpiercer fills out its cast with a bevy of insightfully-twinned side characters. Namgoong Minsoo (Song Kang-ho) and Yona (Ko Ah-sung) play a pair of drug-addled characters who begin as anthropomorphized Macguffins whose sole plot purpose is to override the gates and advance the group, but by the end have transcended their stereotypes in every way. Meanwhile, Gilliam (John Hurt) and Wilford (Ed Harris) represent the diametrically opposed leader of the revolutionary movement and tyrannical despot, respectively. Despite their lack of screentime together, they feel two of a kind. Their relationship to their people, and to each other, pervades the movie.

If it hasn't become apparent by now, Snowpiercer is a political movie, one that (despite its excellent crowd-pleasing action beats) does not condescend to its audience in order to get its message across. Just when you think you have this world figured out, it gives you another wallop from its bag of tricks--never gimmicky, always revelatory. If the first act feels a bit pat, that is only to enhance the astounding freshness of the final act. The cinematography is dark and daring, making the world feel both exotic and lived-in at the same time. This is a special film, one that we are lucky to receive at all. This is me urging you to go out and find it and watch it at the closest cinema that has the dignity to show it. You won't be disappointed.

4.5 / 5  BLOBS

*Snowpiercer actually has nothing to do with "Crazy Train".