SNOWPIERCER - a movie review

When I was a student, I collaborated to a free cinema review distributed locally and was lucky enough to interview a few actors and directors. One of them was Bong Joo-Ho, the director of "Memories of Murder" and "Mother". The movie I interviewed him for was "The Host", a monster movie made with his unic touch of grotesque and heroism which is his signature style. This style is once again clearly visible in the doomed "Snowpiercer".

I say "doomed" because the gestation and the release of that peculiar movie was far from easy. In spite of a five-stars cast (Chris Evans! Ed Harris! Tilda Swinton! John Hurt! and others) the movie was butchered by the producers and never really found its public. Which is kind of the problem for Bong Joon-Ho: his movies are never too straightforward to find a large audience, nor too "deep" to be classified as "auteur stuff". He keeps cultivating this strange numero of equilibrium. Imagine him walking a tight rope. Or better, imagine a train on a slim track in the middle of an viaduct 500m above ground. 

Snowpiercer is adopted from a French graphic novel (Le Transperceneige), whose premices are, to say the least, preposterous. As explained in a short introduction, the humans tried to fight the global warming with chemtrails. But it went horribly wrong: the global temperatures have fallen to record low and the planet is now buried entirely under a thick crust of ice and snow. 

But of course, the 1% have a plan (they always do!). One of them has conceived a circumnagivation railway which covers the whole planet in 365 days. All that remains from humanity is stuck on a high-speed train which is condemned to circumnavigate the globe. I confess i can't really explain the scientific reason behind all this. But nevermind! because (and it's not Hitchcock who is going to contradict me), trains are highly cinematographic and symbolic. All the more so in that movie because the train is divided in several social classes. 

At the back of the train, living in squalid conditions, are the proletarians masses. They are a mixed race sort of people, dirty, starving, uncoughed and bitter. At the top of the train is the rich class, who has all the luxuries available for themselves.

Between these two classes, you can find the technicians and the soldiers, who are in charge 1) to keep the train moving and 2) to control the poor and make sure everyone stays in its place.

Of course, you guess what happens: Chris Evans and Jamie Bell are sick and tired of this state of things. Moreover, the rich class keep picking some children from the poor in order to no-one-knows-what exactly and they are never seen again. It's time for a Revolution!

The great thing about a revolution aboard an ongoing train is that there are only two ways: forward or backward. There is no other way to go. So, the poor keep pushing forward. The rich keep pushing them backwards.

On their way to the top of the train, Chris Evans uncovers all the lies that his class has been fed with (the food, the lack of materials, etc.) and that makes him even more angry and nihilistic. When he reaches the top of the train and discovers the fate of the children, he uncovers also the biggest lie of all: this train is a an ourobouros of steel and steam. A perfect ecological system which is feeding upon itself in order to survive.

Therefore, the possibility could be to give up the fight, take a place at the table proposed to you by the dominant class, abandon your own, and perpetuate the system. Or to blow it up, pure and simple, and to see what happens to the parts.

I know people who have nothing but contempt about Snowpiercer. It's not difficult to see why. First of all, you really need not to think too much about the premices of the movie. If after 15 minutes you still can't believe about this train-world, you should probably give up. Second, Bong Jun-Ho loves to pepper any straight scene with humour and grotesque. You all know these people who can't tell a joke with a straight face. Well, Bong Jun-Ho can't tell a straight story without throwing a joke or a wink at his audience, in the middle of the most horrific scene. This is quite unsettling at times, but it's his trademark. And third, the movie does not propose any straightforward solution to the predicament of the society of this train. It just uncovers the collusion which makes this world go along.