Remember Roger Ebert’s famous quote: “It’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it is about it.”
In other words, the subject of a movie has nothing to with how good it is.
I liked it. Probably my favorite thing was how to design a world in the space provided.
The only way I can answer that is to say that “Snowpiecer” is nothing like “Avatar”. If you didn’t like Terry Gilliam’s “Brazil”, you might consider skipping it though.
Which in no way resembles Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky. Except that a train is probably cheaper to image and film than a starship.
Beacuse…
[SPOILER] Wilford, wealthy entrepreneur and train enthusiast wanted to take the used and unused traintracks on the globe and connect them, making a 'round the world train. He did this quickly, because he KNEW that CM7 was an incorrect solution to global warming, and that the world would freeze. The freeze didn’t happen in one day, it took months for all cities to freeze.
Knowing that the remainder of humanity would survive only on the train, so would human SOCIETY. Hence everyone on the train would “know their place” and be that. [/SPOILER]
What I thought was really cool was how the film completely changed depending on what the next car was. Especially when they get to the school car with 1st graders. Also the cars dedicated to the eco-system. Also the comic element Bong always gives us in the oddest places. And when Curtis (Evans) gets to smoke the very last cigarette on Earth 
Oddly the only thing I remember from that movie (and I had to check) was the tiny CRT’s with magnifiers in front of them and what looked like a lot of antique equipment.
OK, I’m going to pass on this in the theater.
i saw it, loved it. I can’t defend any of the obvious plotholes, they’re there and they’re real. But they didn’t matter at all to me while I was in the story. It’s got style, great characters, good pacing, good dialogue…worth seeing for Tilda Swinton’s performance if nothing else.
You’re right to point out that the potentially-intriguing stories of what happens after the masses breach the elite aeries tend to stay untold. Virtually always, the book or movie ends as soon as the Underclass protagonist has overcome the more-powerful, better-provisioned Elites.
And that is puzzling if we take these ‘class struggle’ tales at face value. It would be interesting to know how the new social order plays out! So why don’t those stories get told?
My guess: though these stories are ostensibly about human societies, they are more fundamentally (if metaphorically) about our own individual human development.
Once you’ve “overthrown” the “rule” of your more-powerful, better-provisioned parents–by growing to adulthood–then the story is over. Psychologically, anyway.
Which is rather ironic, no?
Quoted for truth.
So in other words, it’s a very, very good movie about a world that makes as much sense as a story where the rich drive around in limos fueled by distilling welfare babies.
Oh-Kaay…
For just a couple days at a time?
It’s finally at the theater in Shirlington but only for today & tomorrow.
The premise makes about as much sense as radioactive spiders giving Peter Parker the power to shoot webs and scale buildings. That is, it’s a ridiculous premise, but serves as a hanger for a story. If you can’t swallow crazy premises in superheroes or fantasy, then this would rankle. But most people can suspend disbelief in these cases. Snowpiercer deserves the same allowances.
I saw it over the weekend and really liked it. I’m not normally a fan of action films or “blockbusters” ( my taste runs more towards classics and what people call indie/art films). There was an interesting allegorical level, fight scenes that were actually follow able and well-shot, and interesting visuals of the various train cars. The ending is different from that of your typical blockbuster and makes you think. It wasn’t perfect, but I’d highly recommend it.
So, I finally saw this. First I will say that it is a decent enough film. It looks good. It moves along. It has some good acting moments (I loved Swinton’s role, even though some call her hammy). It has a satisfying ending. It is not a bad film.
No, the basic premise does not make any sense. Also, during the movie, they keep reminding us that this could not possibly be a real situation in any world. There is no attempt to actually explain how things work on this train–it is not what the movie is about. They needed the action to take place on an eternally traveling train, just so they can use it as a metaphor. From a movie perspective, the only thing that matters is that they have to get from point A to point B through a gauntlet.
I really wish they would not compare this movie to Brazil. It seems like every review has a reference to that movie–I swear that must be part of the press packet. Yes, there is a character named Gilliam; and, yes, at one point they put a shoe on Swinton’s head and call it a hat; and, yes, initially there are handful of ducts in the background. That is it. I can see that Bong found some inspiration in the Gilliam movie, but the two could not be more different in both design and tone. This is a dark and often violent film that owes more to Chan-wook Park than Terry Gilliam. From the tone and the design, it is like *Oldboy *crossed with The Cabin in the Woods, maybe with a touch of Resident Evil. It is a blend of brooding grittiness and violence splashed with bits of humor.
That story doesn’t get told because it turns out like Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, Red China, the Khmer Rouge, Revolutionary France… or in the words of pop music “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
You can’t let the entire story unfold because the end result is never as good as the fantasy. Ten minutes after the end of the movie, you’ll already be thinking “Gee, maybe it wasn’t so bad before…”
As for the overall issue of plausibility of the setting: A lot of these stories are just 1984 re-warmed. The war in 1984 is not something Big Brother actually wants to win; the war only exists to create artificial economic scarcity and psychological unity. The train/space-station/etc. doesn’t have to make perfect sense* because it’s just the arbitrary source of privation invented by the powers that be.
Or, to come back to a real-life example: the Khmer Rouge had no rational reason to drive people out of cities and to kill their intellectuals. This could never have created a functional society. But that didn’t stop them.
*Of course, the idea should at least be somehow possible, scientifically speaking. Big Brother has no concern for rational or economical, but even dictators run into the laws of physics eventually.
But the story does get told. Isn’t that exactly what Animal Farm was?
Skywatcher, there are six theaters within twenty miles of you showing Snowpiercer. I don’t know why the theater in Shirlington is only showing it for two days (if that is indeed true), but I don’t think that’s true for any other theater showing it. It certainly wasn’t true in the AFI Silver where I saw it.
I’ve heard a few places that it was planned as a short run (7-10 days) before a VOD release; not sure if that may have changed when the number of theaters was drastically expanded (from ~100 theaters planned for 7/4 and 7/5 to ~250) after the initial NY/LA screenings went so well.
Anyways, I thought that this was good-not-great, but more importantly that it was different, interesting, and creatively vibrant in a way that I probably wouldn’t care too much about in November or December, but that in July is a breath of fresh air. I loved the visuals, and I really loved how the film did both light and dark so well. The school car scene in contrast to most of the last 30 minutes.
If anything I’m surprised the reviews are so consistently good because it seemed to me this would be a movie that is going to have a pretty sharp divide between “at least like, if not love” and “hate, don’t bother seeing it”, and with how Rotten Tomatoes works those movies usually end up in the 60-70% range rather than the mid 90s.
When I read things like this and other comments in the thread, I automatically think of Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory talking about how ridiculous it would be for Superman to catch a falling Lois Lane because the force would kill her.
Get over it, people. It’s just a movie, and a good one. Any movie that you don’t like or even are determined not to like can be made to sound ridiculous if you try hard enough.
Worst movie that I’ve seen a while.
The premise is fine. Every film gets a freebie or two. I can accept complete nonsense–just don’t try to explain things!
Unfortunately, the film does. Where do the protein bars come from? Well, we find out that it comes from ground-up bugs (and somehow this is presented as a big deal even though everyone’s been living in absolute filth the whole time). Now we wonder where the bugs came from. The explanation made it worse.
Likewise the meat locker that the rich people use. If they had not shown it at all, I would just accept that the rich get their steaks from some unknown place. But since they showed the meat locker, I have to wonder where that stuff comes from, since it obviously isn’t going to last decades–or even a few weeks. There’s no cow or chicken farm on the train. Why can’t I accept that the frozen meat comes from somewhere? Maybe I would if they hadn’t gone into some depth about the aquarium balance. Yes, they needed that bit as a hint toward the nature of the train. It just felt really inconsistent to have wildly different degrees of explanation.
The ending was deeply unsatisfying. Take the whole bit where Wilford tries to recruit Curtis to replace him as the new overseer, keeping the train in balance. That’s a well-worn sci-fi trope, but that’s ok; I can live with that. We’re just kept hanging, though! And the whole thing is made irrelevant a short time later.
Or, at the very end, a bit of optimism or is it? The two survivors have only the clothes on their back. They’ll survive longer than “the seven”, but not by much. And what does the polar bear mean? It’s not like life spontaneously generates after being extinct. Maybe conditions weren’t as bad all along as they say–but if so, shouldn’t there be human life left? Why were there no signs of it? Plus, it’s inconsistent with Nam’s observation about the plane.
The movie was, I guess, vaguely ok as a dumb action flick, and had some style aped from Terry Gilliam. But it presents itself as something smarter, and after accepting the central premise, the rest should have some coherency.
And yes, I think it’s entirely fair to compare it to Brazil, 12 Monkeys, and other Gilliam. Not only does it go for the same grimy visual style, it hints (especially at the ending) of the same themes that appear in Gilliam’s work, like those of circularity and inevitability (not to mention classist dystopias). It just never follows through.