South Korean filmmaker Bong Joon-ho has always specialised in giving familiar genres a memorable, off-beat spin in way that often results in irresistible masterpieces. Be it the monster movie colliding with awkward family politics in The Host to the haunting cop antics Memories Of Murder, he’s constantly ploughed his own furrow as he richochets his singular vision off of the screen and directly into your hippocampus.
However, in 2013, the director hopped over to America to make his English language debut by throwing his hat into overcrowded ring of the dystopian sci-fi movie – a move that practically screamed that the director would have his deliberately strange outlook tampered with in order to play better to a wider audience. This did indeed actually occur thanks to the trim-happy studio who predictably demanded less talking and kooky shit and wanted more action. However, sanity prevailed and we got one of the most memorable dystopias to ever fly off the rails.
The Earth has been coated in freezing snow and ice due to an experiment to reverse global warming in 2014 went horribly wrong and the only humans to survive this ice-pocalypse have taken refuge on the Snowpiercer, a huge, self sustaining circumnavigational train that’s been rocketing across the frozen tundra for seventeen years. However, back when the brainchild of reclusive transportation honcho, Wilford, was first launched, a large amount of people managed to squeeze on and took their place at the back of the train – however, as the Snowpiercer’s resources were meticulously planned to ensure balance within its fragile ecosystems, the train immediately fell into that same old division of the haves and the have nots.
However, matters have reached a breaking point and one such passenger of the squalid tail section who has had enough of the inequality is Curtis Everett, who has been honed by his wizened mentor, Gilliam, to stage a couple when the time is absolutely perfect. Armed with knowledge provided by notes hidden within their gelatinous protein bars they get given for food by a mysterious mole, Curtis and his hot-headed second in command, Edgar, gird their fellow train-mates for battle and when the front of the train demands a selection of the tail’s children for reasons unknown, it proves to be the straw that breaks the camels back and a predictably violent revolution occurs.
As Curtis and his fellow, outraged, poor make their way from the back to the front of the train, they begin a journey through a world that’s every bit at alluring as it is enraging as they witness first hand the privileged, mobile world Wilfred has created in his own image. But can Curtis, Edgar, drug addicted former security specialist Namgoong Minsoo and the other rag tag freedom fighters resists the more seductive parts of the Snowpiercer to make it all the way to the engine?
Based upon the French graphic novel Le Tranperceneige, Bong Joon-ho has seemingly found a project that fit his more quirky leanings like a glove despite having to slightly conform to more western standards. However, while most filmmakers might have attacked the film by leaning harder on the slightly video game concepts of having to fight your way through numerous stages to survive and delivered a somewhat soulless action pic with a cool gimmick, Joon-ho instead never loses sight of the corruptive politics at work here that result in both rich and poor passengers being irrevocably warped by their respective existences. The result is an experience that has way more in common with the type of hellish odyssey seen in the likes Apocalypse Now where there are no easy answers or resolutions that await us at the end of the line.
Given a significantly larger budget than he’s probably used to, Joon-ho gets to work with some fascinating world building to create yet another completely knackered world where mankind has had to continuously brutalise itself to not only survive, but to uphold a quality of living that comes at a heavy cost. The tail is a grimy, dark place devoid of windows and hope as everyone is piled on top of each other in makeshift bunks, but as Curtis’ odyssey carries him ever closer to the front of the train, every successive carriage seems to be an entirely new world. There’s the school carriage that’s all brightness and primary colours, there’s the hypnotic aquarium car that sustains all the fish for sea food and there’s the warm hues of a sauna car that manage to give you the feeling of a far more epic progression than just a bunch of angry passengers walking through a train to complain about their section.
However, there’s no part of Joon-ho’s class culture, Marxist hellscape that doesn’t receive the benefit of the director’s endearingly strange view. Captain America himself, Chris Evans plays the lead with a traumatised gravitas and excels during a scene where he lays out exactly how bad things got during the early days of the tail section; John Hurt presents the lastest in his grizzled wise man phase; Jamie Bell is appropriately volcanic as Curtis’ number two and, most notably of all, Tilda Swinton shows up to play as a sycophantic underling equipped with a northern accent, huge glasses and a set of buck teeth that you could open a beer bottle off. With a touch of Terry Gilliam floating around the place that defiantly stands astride the divison between the serious and the eccentric like a dystopian Colossus Of Rhodes, all the actors fill their roles splendidly, but I will admit that viewers searching for more conventional thrills (despite its setting, it’s a world away from Under Seige 2) may be somewhat flummoxed by some of the filmmaking decisions despite all the axe riots and a recognizable leading man. Still, Joon-ho is no slouch in the action department either and a sequence that sees the refugees run into an ambush aided by the total darkness of a passing tunnel and some strategically placed night vision goggles will clench the sphincter with the best of them – but then when you consider that Yeon Sang-ho’s Train To Busan also hailed from South Korean, I guess those guys just know how to set up fights on trains.
However, despite bruising action and thoughtful visuals, the main thing that stands out most is Joon-ho’s dedication to the themes of inequality and classism that would eventually nab him an Academy Award for Parasite that also saw desperate poor people do outlandish things in order to feel like people again – although no one had their arm frozen off as far as I can remember….
But while Snowpiercer found it’s release tampered by the exact type of controlling nature that the film is railing against that may have effected its box office, the fact that it’s managed to preserve and even get a TV based reboot is a testament to how much of a buried gem the film truly is.
So what are you waiting for: all aboard the dystopia train! Toot toot!
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