Snowpiercer (2013)

 

100 best Science Fiction Movies, Empire Magazine list

 

84. Snowpiercer (2013)  

 

Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look! Up in the sky! It's a bird! It's a plane! It's –  

 

Well, maybe I should say –

 

Fast as a speeding John Woo movie, as rich and inventive in its environments as a Luc Besson, able to leap over the laws of science and basic common sense better than Michael Bay, and with an even more cynical a view of social satire than Paul Verhoeven. Look! Down on the tracks! It’s not a bird, it’s a Train! And it’s completely bonkers.

This film started its life as a French comic book series by Writer Jacques Lob (after his death, Benjamin Legrand took over the writing) and Artist Jean-Marc Rochette (first published 1982, I have not read it). It was unknown in the USA before this film because, though many French SF comics have proved popular in English, this one hadn’t been translated into our language. The comic was encountered by South Korean Director Bong Joon-ho in his own country back in 2002, two years after its final installment was published, and he immediately fell in love. By then, the series was bond in three thick volumes, and Bong said he read them all, right there in the bookstore. 

Bong convinced CJ Entertainment that a film based on it had the potential of being a huge international hit and was granted the largest budget in the history of Korean cinema ($40 million USD, so mid-level by Hollywood standards). He gathered an International Cast and his co-Writer was Kelly Masterson from the USA. 80% of the dialogue was in English, the crew similarly spoke English because that was the closest thing to a shared language on-set, but it was filmed almost entirely in the Czech Republic on a massive, 100 meters long sound-stage, said to be the longest in Europe. Production lasted 72 days, which sounds like a generous amount of time, but shorter than on most of Bong’s previous films.

 

It's a story of Climate Disaster, unintended consequences, insane hubris, and brutal Class-Stratification. Most of all, it exemplifies the most extreme peregrinations of nightmarish Malthusianism you’ll ever see, wherein life is inescapably a zero-sum game and only through Tyranny can the illusion of Sustainability be, well, sustained.  

 

The story’s nightmare begins on the then-barely-Future date of July 1^st, 2014, when fears of Global Warning encouraged a really dumb World-wide experiment which unexpectedly triggers a new Ice Age. The global mean temperature quickly drops to minus-80-degrees; I’m not sure if that’s Celsius or Fahrenheit, but trust me, Humanity isn’t surviving either. As that was only a year ahead of the film’s actual release-date, one must wonder how crazed USA Oligarch Wilford (Ed Harris) managed to build Snowpiecer, his Super-Train, and Railroad exactly in time to save dwindling Humankind. The Train is a fully-enclosed, self-sustaining, environment, with an inexhaustible power supply; in the Real-World, the International Space Station doesn’t come near to Wilford’s achievement. The improbabilities and impossibilities associated with this set-up are too many to easily list, but the audience accepts all, because they are seeing it, therefore it’s real.

 

The Train is 1001-cars-long in the comic, but apparently reduced to 60 in the film version. It continuously circumnavigates the frozen Globe over rails Wilford’s Mega-Corporation laid itself and those left-behind by the lost Civilization. The main action takes place 2031, so the Train has been in perpetual motion like a rat of a wheel long enough that children have been born on it, are near-adults, and know no other world. As anyone can tell, the whole of Humanity outside the Train is decades-dead, so those on the Train are akin to Noah’s family on the Biblical Ark, waiting for the World to warm enough for them to finally choose a port, disembark, and start to rebuild.

 

It’s not a nice environment. The majority of the passengers are the regulated to the filthy, crowded, windowless, slums of rear carriages. They survive on nasty, black, "protein blocks," made of crushed cockroaches that are provided by their oppressive Overlords. They are told to literally eat their own shit. The drug-of-choice is a hallucinogenic made of industrial waste. Meanwhile, the elite live in the front carriages, enjoying tremendous luxuries. Director Bong compared it to being stuck on an airplane for a generation, "[W]hat you feel when you … see all the empty seats in business class after you spent more than 10 hours flying in the confined economy class seats. You realize some people got there very comfortably and almost have a fit of anger."

 

There is no social mobility. There are frequent, failed, revolts by the under-classes, and a staggering high death-by-violence rate among those whose life-expectancy would be short even without the Overlord’s Storm Troopers periodically beating and hacking them to death.

 

Yet another revolt is planned by aged-Sage Gilliam (John Hurt) and led by Hero Curtis Everett (Chris Evans). The Revolutionaries think that they might have a better chance this time because their intelligence assures them that Nam-gung Min-su (Song Gang-ho), the designer of the door-locking system, is being held on the Prison Carriage; if they can fight tooth-and-nail that far forward, they could, possibly, unlock the doors all the way to the Train’s “Sacred Engine,” where Milford dwells. Though the cast is international, the main Villain and Hero, Milford and Curtis, are from the USA. Milford is spoken of by everyone, but not seen in the flesh until the very end of the film, making him sort of a sinister version of the Wizard of Oz (book by Frank L. Baum first published in 1900).

 

I loved this film, but it would be wrong to fail to point-out huge flaws.

 

The political satire is one-dimensional, with a strong Marxist bend by literalizing Carl Marx’s metaphor, “revolutions are the locomotives of history” and Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “bodily capital,” but then descending into Nietzschean Nihilism that doesn’t address the goals of Revolution except that Revolution is action, taking more joy in dancing in the ruins than constructing anything lasting. The story is explicit in that all passengers, not only the Lower Classes, are in a trap they didn’t choose, but the attitude is that the Upper Classes are Evil just because they’re the Upper Class.

 

The cast is talented and convincingly intense, but almost entirely humorless. Bong has a reputation for exceptional characterization, as evidenced in the only other film of his I’ve seen, “The Host” (2006), but this movie has a much larger cast (there are several more leads than those listed above) and he doesn’t show the same skill at thumbnail characterization as, for example, Writer/Directors George Romero or John Salles. Bong seems to want all his actors to take this absurd set-up as wholly as real and painful, which was admirable, but misguided.

 

Though the basic idea – Weird, Post-Apocalyptic, Anti-Authoritarian, focused on brutal Class-Stratification, isn’t unique, but its Super-Train setting makes it hard to find a truly comparable movie. A number of Critics cited two films, neither Post-Apocalyptic but still SF Dystopias, Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1925) and Director Terry Gilliam's “Brazil” (1985). Because of a violent Proletarian Revolution, “Metropolis” is probably more similar but, given that Bong most likely named John Hurt's character “Gilliam” as a homage, “Brazil” is cited more often. The comparison does not serve “Snowpiercer” well, because though Gilliam’s Dystopia was horrific, it’s also full of humor, and the presence of humor made the tragedy that much more heart-rending. Meanwhile, “Snowpiercer” doesn’t crack a smile nearly enough, and that eventually makes its significant inventiveness seem a little redundant.

 

Only one Actor is free to mock her character’s absurdities, so hers becomes the only real stand-out among solidly professional performances -- a nearly unrecognizable Tilda Swindon as Minister Mason, wickedly playing a character originally written for a man. Swindon is adorned with a terrible wig, a piggish nose, unattractive false teeth, over-sized glasses, and sagging breasts. Her costume is based on an old photo taken of an elderly matron standing amongst boxes of dead birds in the backrooms of the Smithsonian, but also adorns military regalia and a fur coat. Swindon is known as being chameleon-like in her roles, and here the Costume Designer Catherine George, whom Swindon had previously worked with on “We Have to Talk about Kevin” (2011), proved equally so; it is hard to imagine two films with such radically different approaches to clothing. Swindon was among the first cast and had unusual amount of time to work with George during pre-production.

 

Swindon’s accent is an exaggeration of a Schoolmarm from Yorkshire that Swindon remembers from her youth and struts around with the clownishness of an Adolf Hitler or Muammar Qaddafi; she says Margaret Thatcher was an influence. Her Character gets the longest and best speech (most of the dialogue is in short, sharp, exchanges) and does so in the middle of a torture-scene, during which she pantomimes Mason’s metaphor, “I am the hat, you are the shoe.”

 

The final confrontation between Curtis and Wilford was especially disappointing. The whole film convinced us of its Malthusianism trap, and there’s even a good surprise twist that feeds into that idea, but when cornered, Wilford is unconvincing in his commitment to any Virtue buttressing his Mania. I, as a passive audience member, could’ve made a better case for Evil than he, and that’s never a good thing. The conclusion then got worse when our Heroes ruin themselves and everyone else.

 

But there’s glory in this film, mostly in the amazingly textured realization of its setting. Car-after-car-after-car of the same confined and boxy shape continually mutating during the horizontal-climb up the Social Ladder. Of the 1001 or 60 carriages that the story implies, 26 of them were designed, built, and filmed in. As the Heroes move forward, they never know what’s behind the next door. Bong compared the feeling to an experience he had during his youth:

 

He was born into the era of South Korea’s Military Dictatorship, and became politized in college. “I was part of the protests. It’s part of my blood. It’s part of my history, my upbringing.” In a separate interview, “1988 … was almost the end of the military dictatorship ... In one particular instance, I ran away [from the Riot Police] and opened a random door and ended up in a very classy, high-end hotel. I found myself in this lobby where there was piano music and just two seconds ago they were shooting tear gas at me. There I was listening to Mozart and guests were dressed up in nice clothes drinking coffee as if nothing was going on. I was just in a daze, thinking 'where am I'?”

 

Some coaches are booby trapped, but over-all they become more attractive the farther forward one went. One car is filled with fish-tanks, another a green house, another has a swimming pool, there are also a sushi bar and a nightclub. One coach proves to be a happy, colorful, Classroom wherein bright-eyed children are taught to revere Wilford as a God, but then a particular nasty fight scene unfolds. Also, as we move farther forward, the coaches have windows, and the sunlight is lovely except that the vistas outside are of Doom. Actor Swinton said of the sets, “Every carriage is a different cinematic atmosphere. You have your Fellini carriage and your ’80s Derek Jarman carriage, and then you have your Antonioni carriage.”

 

It's hard to tell where the responsibilities of the Production Designer, Ondrej Nekvasil, and the FX Supervisor, Eric Durst, began and ended, but I think we can safely say that Nekvasil was the larger player in the film’s over-all look as the set-design was so central. Durst though, made interesting choices. The film is predictably CGI heavy, but less so than one might think, as Durst preferred miniatures and practical effects. If the film has a visual failing, it’s that the almost-all CGI exterior landscapes didn’t live up to the models, practical effects, and sets.

 

The mutation of the environment is reflected in the costuming, those from the back carriages are dressed mostly without color and often in rags, but all is cleaner and brighter as one moves along. Wilford, all the way forward in the Engine, wears silk pajamas and a smoking jacket. 

 

Not only was Comic-Book Artist Rochette’s artwork the foundation of the film’s design, some of his work is directly integrated into the film’s visuals.

 

The whole narrative echoes the progressing through levels of a video game, but the camera work by Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo, who had worked with Bong before, is more engaging than that. Hong kept a deliberate roughness, echoing the look of a Found Footage film, and that illusionary instability in the framing was especially effective during the numerous, and diverse, combat sequences. This effect is strengthened because all the cars were on a massive, 150-ton, gimble-system, so the Actors had the adapt to realistic rocking and vibrations as they propelled themselves through the script’s action. The most explicit video Game reference is a POV-shot-dominated battle in pitch-blackness; we see our blind Heroes through the eyes of the Stormtroopers’ night-vison goggles, and it’s remarkably cruel and intense. Apparently mimicking the earlier Dystopian SF film, “Children of Men” (2006), it was shot in the unusually tight aspect ratio of 1.85:1, while the widescreen standard used in Hollywood is 2.40:1.

 

Stunt Coordinator Julian Spencer must’ve had a hellacious job, almost every fight scene involved large crowds in tight spaces, using axes and hammers and the like. As far as I know, no one was hospitalized.

 

This was Bong’s fifth feature. He been hugely popular in S. Korea since his second, “Memories of Murder” (2003, I haven’t seen it), then started developing an international Fan-base with his third, the excellent “The Host,” which mixed Family Drama and Monster Movie tropes with unusually intelligent political messaging: It explores the discontent among S. Korea’s Liberals with the incompatence of their own government, the nation’s secondary status compared to the USA, and the society’s disinterest in facing the messy history it endured over the last sixty-plus-years. Actor Song had worked with Bong before, notably on “The Host,” as did Ko Asung; amusingly, they played father and daughter in both movies. Song would work with Bong again on “Parasite” (2019, I haven’t seen it), which won Oscars for Best Foreign Film, Screenplay, Director, and Picture in the USA; the last being an exceptionally important, being the first-ever Best Picture Oscar to go to a foreign-language film (then President Donald Trump notoriously complained “Was it good? I don’t know. I’m looking for, like – can we get like ‘Gone With The Wind’ back, please?”).

 

No film worth its salt is attempted unplanned, but I’ve noticed that the level of obsessive planning vs on-set improvisation is the most important distinction of any Director’s personal style. Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick were known for obsessive planning and perfectionism, while Jean Luc Goddard and Mike Liegh were loved for their improvisation; in truth, Hitchcock and Kubrick improvised more than generally recognized, and Goddard and Liegh were careful planners, but when compared to each other, these two pairs seem to come from different planets. Also, not surprisingly, the more expensive a film is, the less the improvisation, as the financial pressure seems to make improvisation an unreasonable risk.

 

The UK and USA cast members were impressed that Bong seemed to know exactly what he wanted more specifically than most others they’d worked with, like quickly executing scenes with multiple setups while using a single camera; Bong seemingly editing the film in his head and they compared him to Hitchcock and Kubrick. Meanwhile, the Korean cast talked about how different this production was than their experience at home, where multiple things are tried out on-the-set. Bong, himself, spoke about how the film required more advanced prep than any other project he’d ever done, and he didn’t seem to like how the extensive pre-planning slowed-down getting behind the camera, and then shortened the actual shooting schedule.

 

Actor Ko, whose very first film was Bong’s “The Host,” had never been involved in pre-production before “Snowpiercer.” She found her suggestions listened to and some made it into the final script, notably making the Classroom scene more brutal. Is it possible that Bong was blessed with a mutation ability, to shoot like Liegh in a modest-budget film, allowing himself more-breathing room, but then like Kubrick when given a historic (for his country) budget?

 

Korean films generally don’t try to leap onto the International Market as boldly as “Snowpiecer,” so one would’ve expected it needed the platform of the Festival Circuit to prepare its exportation. For reasons I can’t fathom, this hugely, financially, risky, venture premiered Korean-only, where it became a sensation, one critic (whose name I can’t remember) joking, “it became almost a national duty to see the film.” It pulled in $60 million USD in a country of only a bit more than 50 million people. That opened the Festival doors to it, and interest from the Weinstein Company for wide-release in the USA and UK. 

 

Its slightly-more-than two-hour running-time apparently concerned Distributor Harvey Weinstein, who pushed for more-than-twenty-minutes of cuts in exchange for a major release. This was met with a surprising push-back by USA comic-books Fans, who never had the opportunity to read the original, still untranslated, graphic novels. This was part of an increasing trend -- as comic-book films became more popular, they became more expensive, and as they became more expensive, more cooks were interfering with the recipes, and the Fan community resented the studio interference. The Fans triumphed, and the USA/UK version of the film was the same as the Korean, but didn’t receive nearly as wide a release as initially promised.

 

One of the Actors, Hurt, led this revolt against the cuts. Hurt said, “I’ve got a long involvement with Harvey, and of late he seems to be insistent on changing everything, particularly cutting things short, and I think it would have wrecked this film … it would be everything that involved the characters … he would have cut and just left the action, and the action simply doesn’t work without the rest of it. It would just be gratuitous violence then.” Hurt compared it to how with film “Alien” (1979), the audiences responded to the unusual characterization in what was otherwise a body-count-driven Monster Movie, and how Fans still approached him about it, despite his smallish role in a more-than-thirty-years-old film.

 

The interviewer also asked Hurt, “Did anyone advise you against speaking out publicly against Weinstein?”

 

Hurt laughed, “I’m 74, what’s he going to do to me?”

 

As it happened, Weinstein’s disgrace, down-fall, and criminal prosecution (wholly unrelated to any of this) was only four years in the future, in 2017. That year also saw Hurt releasing his last three films before he died of natural causes, being hailed as one of the greatest acting talents in the World.

 

The film, though obviously flawed, was more-than respectably successful, though not a gigantic hit (most place the blame on Weinstein for it not making more money). Its release brought about the English translation of the graphic-novel series, the creation of a fourth volume (2015), and TV series (2020, I haven’t seen it). It also has shifted the goals of the whole of the South Korean film industry to a much greater interest in reaching out to a Global market.

 

Trailer:

Snowpiercer Official US Release Trailer #1 (2014) - Chris Evans Movie HD - YouTube