Snowpiercer

I'm not really sure what I think about Snowpiercer which is why this thing is running today instead of Monday. There's a lot about the movie that I think is rad, but then there are other parts of it that are just outright weird and clunky. For every visceral action sequence there are weird pacing issues, and for every carefully thought out metaphor there's some borderline terrible dialogue.  

Describing the set up for the movie makes it sound way goofier than it is, but here goes. A bunch of the world's governments decide to inject a special chemical in the air in an effort to counteract global warming. This ends up backfiring and plunging the world into a new ice age. The last remnants of humanity live aboard a train designed by a man named Wilford that makes a loop around the world once a year and is powered by a perpetual motion engine designed to run forever.

A sort of social order a la The Hunger Games emerges with the rich who could afford tickets living in the front of the train and the poor who forced their way onto the train before its departure living in the tail. The passengers in the tail, headed by Chris Evans' revolutionary leader Curtis and John Hurt's revolutionary veteran Gilliam, tired of subsisting on protein cubes and living in filth while passengers in the front eat steak decide to take the engine to the train. They are kept in their place by Tilda Swinton's Mason, a character that seems like an especially weird transplant from Panem.

That's the basic setup, but like all great sci-fi stories it's all more or less a metaphor for something else. Sure, the metaphor is hidden behind a series of slick and thrilling action scenes, inventive and beautiful set design, and enough actors you definitely recognize from other stuff turning in great performances that you don't have to see it if you want to, but once you do the movie becomes a whole lot more interesting. 

In fact, I think it's the ideas and performances in Snowpiercer that make some of its issues forgivable. The pacing is all over the place and the movie is unabashedly weird in parts in a way that I've started to identify with Korean movies. The dialogue is bad in spots, but more often then not the actors, Chris Evans and Tilda Swinton in particular, sell it hard enough that you buy it. Sure, there's "Control the engine, control the world", but later when Curtis says that he hates that he knows what people taste like and that he knows that "babies taste best" the heartbreaking delivery makes it appropriately horrifying rather than silly.

Likewise, you can pick apart the whole conceit with the train and the closed ecosystem contained within with almost no effort. There's no way that they could store enough livestock to eat like that and just where the hell is everybody sleeping in this thing and on and on, but the idea of the train, its engine, and the ecosystem it contains is so integrated into the movie's plot and metaphor that if you buy into it, it all works very well. Almost in spite of itself. 

I get the feeling that Snowpiercer is going to go the way of the cult classic. It's an extremely interesting movie that's made better by its weirdness and flaws. It's at once a summer movie and an anti-blockbuster. The future of humanity is at stake, but the movie feels almost claustrophobic in how personal it is. It's definitely not a movie for everyone, and I'm still not even sure if I think it's good, but I do think that most people should watch it only so that they can tell me what they think.