While Snowpiercer is based on a French graphic novel by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette, it feels like the most natural thing in the world that it was given cinematic life as a South Korean film by director Bong Joon-Ho (best known internationally for his monster movie The Host). For more than a decade that country's national cinema has been largely defined by exercises in trying to cram as many and varied cinematic tones, styles and ideas into a single film as is reasonably possible (and usually far beyond). Lo and behold, Snowpiercer is a film about an eccentric visionary trying to cram the entirety of human civilisation into a tiny microcosm. The result is a beautiful marriage of form and content, and one of the best and brightest action movies of a year that has been surprisingly stacked with deceptively thoughtful and terrifically entertaining popcorn cinema.
Because it wasn't already enough of a mess of influences and origins, Snowpiercer takes place predominantly in English, with a fairly recognisable cast. The film begins in 2031, seventeen years after a misguided attempt to combat global warming flash-froze the entire planet Earth. The only survivors were those who made it aboard a colossal train whose tracks span the entire Earth, devised by an industrialist referred to only as Wilford (Ed Harris). The train is entirely self-sufficient and capable of sustaining life indefinitely, but that quality of life is immensely variable. Those who live near the front of the train do so in comfort and opulence, while the carriages further to the back are refugees who are subject to abuse and horrific living conditions in exchange for their continued survival. Having had quite enough of this after 17 years, one Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) moves to spearhead a rebellion in the train's rearmost carriage, under the guidance of an elderly passenger named Gilliam (John Hurt).
That's more of a plot skeleton than an actual synopsis, but most of the film's pleasures are found in its relentless push through carriage after carriage of the train, each door concealing wholly unexpected and delightful surprises, from blackly comic interludes, to surprisingly tender character moments, to a whole lot of rousing action setpieces. The cast is joined by supporting players like Octavia Spencer, Tilda Swinton and Host veterans Song Kang-Ho and Go Ah-Sung, among others, all acting in wildly different registers but all terrifically fun to watch. Bong has never been a director particularly bound by things like "consistency" or "flow", and the premise of Snowpiercer has invigorated those tendencies considerably. It even supports the film's themes in its own way; as things progress towards the front of the train and into the upper echelons of society, the imagery and the fabric of the film become more garish and excessive in keeping with the upper-class lifestyles on display.
I'm sure it's no surprise from that description that Snowpiercer wears its allegory on its sleeve in bright primary colours. Maybe it's the comic book origins, maybe it's the language barrier, maybe it's simply because it left more time to go wild with the visuals, but the film is full to the brim with declamatory dialogue and barbarically direct expression of its themes through dialogue. The cast helps a lot to sell it - Evans and Spencer downplay things fiercely and effectively, while Swinton, Song and Go run headlong and merrily into live-action cartoon. As far as I'm concerned this is an asset and not a failing of the film's, anyway; loud and direct is what keeps the energy high and the pacing unflagging.
Snowpiercer is not a great film because it is flawless, though. Some of it is baked into the movie, like the intentional and gleeful lack of any kind of conceptual rigour to the sci-fi trappings; Children of Men this is not. The linear, cramped nature of the setting also means that some of the last-act revelations don't really land with the force that they should - when characters and plot devices haven't shown up in a while, it's not difficult to surmise where they've gone - and without that force, one is left with a great deal more time to mull over some of the loopier developments. Finally, and this is probably the only flaw that undercuts what the film is actually trying to accomplish, rather than a case of failing to achieve things it was never trying to do: the cast is too goddamn white. The presence of Song, Go and Spencer is terrific, to be sure, but it's not enough. A film this loudly and passionately opposed to social inequality and the behaviour of the upper class should ideally have a little more awareness of the lines along which power and wealth are generally distributed. It's a problem that has plagued allegorical science fiction for a long time, but it's still irritating here, especially given the film's international pedigree.
So the whole movie is kind of a mess, then. But it's a mess with a great deal of character and a dogged pursuit of its goals, and its highs are greater and more sustained than its lows by a huge measure, even if its disparate elements don't entirely gel. It's everything that I, for one, would have hoped for from South Korea's biggest and splashiest cinematic release yet.
9/10
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