Snowpiercer is one of this year’s darkest, grimmest, most misanthropic films – and it’s also one of its weirdest. It’s messy and narratively imperfect, but the cast is game for whatever madness director Bong Joon-Ho (The Host) can conjure up. For all its faults, Snowpiercer is never boring.
The film takes place in 2031, seventeen years after a substance called CW-7, intended to curtail global warming, instead froze the whole world, extinguishing all life. The survivors all live on a giant train which circumnavigates the globe nonstop. The rich and the priveleged live in the front section, while those who couldn’t afford better accomodations live in the tail. Resentment is brewing and a rebellion is fomenting, led by Curtis Everett (a fantastic Chris Evans). Evans gives 100% in every scene, his handsome features obscured by a dark beard and darker grime. He’s intense and sometimes unlikable. Evans, for all his aw-shucks earnestness as Captain America, has always been an adventurous actor (check out his turns in Puncture, The Iceman, and Sunshine if you don’t believe me). As far as Evans’ fellow Avengers go, I can guarantee you that Robert Downey Jr. ain’t gonna play a role like this any time soon.
With the help of Edgar (Jamie Bell), Tanya (Octavia Spencer), and Gilliam (John Hurt), Curtis begins the rebellion, ultimately taking a prisoner in the form of Minister Mason (Tilda Swinton, with a bizarre accent and fake teeth).
As Curtis makes Mason lead them to the front of the train, Snowpiercer enjoys one of its best, most visually dynamic sequences. As viewers we become so used to the dirt and misery of the tail section, that it’s a hell of a system shock to see Curtis and Co. travel through a greenhouse, an aquarium (where they have an impomptu sushi lunch), and a classroom (where Snowpiercer makes a misstep by having Alison Pill’s teacher character really hammer in the brainwashing).
Joon-Ho doesn’t slouch with the combat, either. The train setting is novel in its linear nature, and leads to some very clever set pieces, such as a brawl between the rebels and a small army of masked soldies wielding axes.
If nothing else, Snowpiercer has an impressively high body count. Literally anyone can die, and the uneasiness that that knowledge fosters in the viewer makes it an almost unbearably tense experience.
The film is far from perfect, but its saving grace is its cast (and score by Marco Beltrami). Evans, Bell, Hurt, Swinton, and The Host‘s Kang-Ho Song all bring their A game, and keep you invested in this surreal, dark, brutal fantasia. Snowpiercer might not be the best sci-fi film ever made, but it’s definitely one of the most unique.
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