Seeing as Bong Joon-ho’s Korean-language film Mother, which was released in the US back in 2010, was one of the darkest, most complex, and most uncompromising thrillers that I’ve seen in a number of years, I went into his new film, Snowpiercer, feeling pretty optimistic—even though it’s a post-apocalypse movie built on the ridiculous premise that the world is a frozen wasteland and the last surviving members of the human race are all living on a super-long, self-sustaining train that continuously circles the globe. Is it possible for anyone, even a talent on the level of Bong’s, to take a premise this inherently head-scratching in its weirdness and still make a movie that’s engaging and relatable to audiences? Apparently it is, and the secret to the formula seems to be to cast Captain America as your lead.
To get back to the plot though—this is a movie that shouldn’t work. If you give it a moment’s thought, there’s no reason for what happens in this movie to be set on a moving train, there’s no reason for the poor people who act as our heroes to exist on the train in the way that they do, and, in general, there’s no reason that an audience should buy any of the broadly drawn, cartoony characters who we’re introduced to over the course of the story. But Snowpiercer introduces us to those characters, it gives us ridiculous explanations for the particulars of its world, and not only do we buy everything we’re given, we lap it up greedily and we ask for more.
The film starts with some talk about climate change. In its future, humanity became so concerned with global warming that a plan was eventually made to shoot a chemical into the atmosphere that would cool things down and get the environment back under control. Problem is, the plan worked so well that the whole world ended up freezing and everything quickly died. Everything, that is, other than the people on the aforementioned train. After the setup, Snowpiercer turns into a story about class struggle. The main conflict here is that the front of the train is made up of an upper class who live in abject comfort and wealth, while the back of the train is made up of a lower class who get herded together like cattle and have every moment of their life regulated by brutal stormtroopers who feed them disgusting blocks of protein sludge and steal their children from them for mysterious purposes. The poor people don’t like this, so they’re planning on starting a revolution and fighting their way to the front of the train. Curtis (Chris Evans) is their leader. A terrible woman named Mason (Tilda Swinton) acts as the face of the ruling class they’re rebelling against. Over the course of the film, many others join in on the fight.
Snowpiercer is an ensemble movie mostly, and Bong should definitely be commended for the insanely talented cast (including names like John Hurt, Octavia Spencer, Ewen Bremner, Alison Pill, Ed Harris, Kang-ho Song, Jamie Bell, Ah-sung Ko, Alison Pill, and others) he was able to compile for his English language debut, but Evans and Swinton are so important to the success of the film that they need to get the bulk of our focus here. As he proved in the Captain America movies, Evans is great at projecting an air of authority, so he works really well as the one glimpse of hope who these endlessly put-upon people would choose to rally around. Swinton, for her part, is so slimily repugnant, sucking her hillbilly teeth and being as privileged and entitled as a live-action Cruella de Vil, that you can’t help but hate her deep in your bones, and you can’t help but actively want to see her get her earned comeuppance. That you love him so much and hate her so much works wonders for keeping you engaged in the action. Special mention should also be made of Alison Pill, who shows up in one scene as a Stepford-esque automaton and is so delightfully psychotic that it has to be seen to be believed.
The thing about the acting that’s crazy is that all of the characters are so broadly drawn, and all of the performances are so over-the-top and cartoony, that you still don’t feel like you should be watching this film and praising its actors. These performers are so good that they’re the type who can go crazy and still make you accept what they’re doing, however, even if it looks ridiculous at first. Everyone is swinging for the fences, but the tone of the movie is so exploitive and all of the action that happens around the dialogue is so entertaining that it just seems to fit. Much of this movie’s run time is taken up by scenes of the guy who we know as Captain America fighting his way through a train while chopping people up with an axe, and that’s just plain awesome. The step-by-step nature of the rebels’ fight through the train echoes something like the video game structure of The Raid: Redemption, where the simple structure works to push the pace and make sure that every scene, no matter how focused on fighting and guns, is important in building toward an eventual climax, and every character, no matter how small a role they play in the story, can be remembered thanks to just one affectation, or just one outlandish piece of costuming. When the story being told is so simple, you don’t think to look for complexity elsewhere. Snowpiercer’s biggest strength is that it’s always pushing things forward, always showing you something new, and always keeping its end-goal in mind.
Even that climax is something that probably shouldn’t work though. How many action-based movies can you think of where the big climactic moment is not a chase or a fight, but instead a lengthy monologue given by the protagonist? That’s basically what happens here, as the film peaks with Evans’ character telling us a story that fills us in on his history, and what his relationships are to all of the other people we’ve been watching him fight alongside. The speech goes completely against the classic filmmaking rule of “show, don’t tell,” but it still manages to work as the biggest moment in the movie because of the strength of the writing (the screenplay is credited to Bong and Kelly Masterson, and was based off of a graphic novel called ‘Le Transperceneige’) and the conviction with which Evans delivers it. His monologue raises the stakes of the action, deepens the character relationships that have been established, shines a new light on everything you’ve seen to that point, and takes a sci-fi story that was already pretty dark and deepens the hues so that it becomes something legitimately haunting. This one sticks with you for a while, long after the credits have rolled.
Nothing about Snowpiercer should have worked. Every aspect of the story is too weird and too alien for an audience to embrace. Everything about the characters as they were written is too big and too broad to be taken seriously. Somehow though, Bong and his crew have pulled off a magic trick of tone where each individual aspect of the movie becomes greater than the sum of its parts. The outlandish premise produces real human drama, the cartoony performances produce iconic characters—it all just works.
In a movie where the action wasn’t so entertaining, you’d be shaking your head at the explanation of how and why this post-apocalyptic world exists. In a movie where the performers weren’t so charismatic, you’d be questioning how the filmmaker thought he could get away with presenting such one-dimensional characters. With Snowpiercer though, there isn’t a single moment where nitpicking questions of logic or craft cross your mind. You’re so compelled by the drama on the screen, so dazzled by the action, that you’re perfectly content to just go along for the ride. And by the time it’s over, there’s no question that you’ve just watched one of the most original sci-fi/post-apocalypse movies that’s hit theaters in years. It’s amazing what can be accomplished when the right group of people go about accomplishing it.
