Film review: Snowpiercer (2013)

Background:
I am a recent convert to the Snowpiercer work; coming in at the third version of the tale. The first telling is in the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige. The graphic novel was made into a 2013 film by Korean director Bong Joon-ho. The third outing for the tale is a Netflix production of the same name (season one is available now, season two should be released by the end of 2021). I have watched all of season one of the Netflix offering, and can strongly recommend it thus far.

This review is all about the film; not the Netflix production, and not the original French graphic novel, though that is the source of the story.

Snowpiercer’s cast has considerable strength. Chris Evans (Captain America) in the lead, supported by Song Kang-ho, Tilda Swinton, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, Go Ah-sung, John Hurt, and Ed Harris.

The story is simple. Humanity had so FUBARed the weather system that climate change had flicked over to super-hot and the planet, and everyone/thing that lives on/in it, was facing an untimely and sweaty end. To remedy this, a chemical compound was developed that would counteract the climate damage. Unfortunately, when the chemical was sown into the Earth’s atmosphere, it was discovered that someone had got the decimal point in the wrong place and instead of reducing the temperature by a bit, the global temperature plummeted, and soon a new ice age was upon us all.

To escape the -120c ice age temperatures, Mr Wilford built an eternal engine (train) that (somehow) circumnavigated the frozen globe on a world-wide network of rails. The train had no drivers/pilots, it merely traversed the planet on the same tracks, year after year. One revolution of the train was equal to the passing of one calendar year so, you know, there’s some kind of annual continuity there, even though the passing of time is marked within just the one season – winter. The train is staffed and stocked with such ingenuity, that it will never need to stop. Indeed, we are told by a class of schoolchildren, that if the train were ever to stop, everyone onboard would die.

And so to the story.

The focus of the film is the plight of the Tailees, a group of 1,000 passengers crammed into one carriage at the end of the train. Unlike the passengers in First, or Second Class, the Tailees are a mob of non-fee-paying passengers who forced their way onto the train as it left its first (and last) station.

For reasons best known to the director this structural hierarchy, and the differences between the haves, the nearly-haves, and the have-nots are not explored.

What is continually brought out is the harsh, brutalist lifestyle that the Tailees endure, under the subjection of the paramilitary enforcers, headed by Tilda Swinton, as they battle to wrest control from the deranged Wizard of Oz-like Mr Wilford.

The film follows the Tailees’ struggle for a societal change, a revolution that will overturn the barely-glimpsed, never detailed hierarchy, as they attempt to establish ‘One Train’ (despite the fact that the passengers in First and Second Class all paid Big Bucks to be aboard, whilst the Tailees are essentially a bunch of freeloaders, who contributed nothing to the onboard society).

I can’t go into plot detail without revealing much by way of spoilers, but I can safely say that the film Snowpiercer, taken as a whole, is the very worst film I have ever sat through. There are so many structural problems with the film that I have a strong temptation to list every single one. But I won’t. Not all of them. Just a few of the big problems the film has.

The most obvious issue is that the class structure/hierarchy between the Third Class (staff), Second Class (the wealthy), and First Class (the uber wealthy) is not even explored. We see the brutality and the plight of the Tailees and we get fleeting glimpses of privilege enjoyed by those in First Class, but we don’t see the differences between the First and the Second or the First/Second and the Third Classes. This is a puzzling shortcoming; societal structure and hierarchy is illustrated by the differences between all levels of that society, rather than the extremes at either end.

Another logical problem is that The Seven (a group of rebels who made a break for it some years in the past, and who were frozen solid in the frigid air before achieving a significant distance from the train), are unchanged year after year, as observed by the passengers, yet a crashed aeroplane in a valley below The Seven has snow melting off it.

That there is no attempt to explain where the millions of locusts and other bugs come from, in order to make up the food which the 1,000 Tailees eat every day, is another issue.

In its favour, however, the blood-letting fight scenes were good cinema. There were clear ties forward to the later Korean film ‘Train to Busan’ (which I strongly recommend). There is a degree of high art in the way the fights were filmed and choreographed, and one environmental change mid-fight was very cleverly put together.

People have attempted to justify Snowpiercer’s shortcomings by saying the film is a metaphor for Korean society. This is clearly nonsense, if for no other reason than the film is based on a French graphic novel. Whoever came up with this theory really needs to spend more time reading the source material, and less time hanging about on fanzine websites on Tumblr (wherever), because what this film is definitely not about is Korean societal values.

There is also a very troubling third act which features a near incomprehensible duologue between Chris Evans and John Hurt, which has no value. But as a masterclass in wasting the talents of two top actors, it was a strong show.

In summary:
The film enjoys a decent performance by Chris Evans. Tilda Swinton puts her Scottishness aside and does Hilda Ogden with the dial turned all the way up to 11. John Hurt does what John Hurt does to support this broken project. This film was an obvious attempt to bring to the global stage the continued rise of the Korean film industry. Unfortunately, the film was killed with love (or incompetence). It’s a mess. The DP does a valiant job; some of the shots are high art, but others should have been left on the cutting-room floor. The director gives this film the all guns blazing (literally) treatment, but it lacks heart. Despite a strong beginning, it has a weak middle, and an ending that is logically incomprehensible. The editing has more holes than a Swiss cheese factory in full-on production.

Top film critic Mark Kermode might be kind in describing this film as ‘not without its flaws’, but I’m not kind. I have only walked out of the cinema once (Prometheus). If I had watched Snowpiercer in a multiplex and not in a C19 lockdown, my walk-out rate would have been doubled.

I expected a nice, tight-beam, tense, drama of a film that benefited from a firm hand on the tiller. I got a jam sandwich that had been sitting in the bottom of a full rucksack for three days.

This film is awful. Avoid it. Find something else to do for 126 minutes and put some quality into your life instead