I just watched it this evening. The movie basically lost me right at the beginning, when they hauled away the guy who knew how to play the violin. I felt like the movie was screaming at me, “HEY MAN DO YOU GET IT? JUST LIKE THE NAZIS DID. DO YOU SEE HOW BAD THESE GUYS ARE?”
The whole thing was a serviceable action movie overshadowed by the hammiest of ham-fisted allegory.
I can’t even imagine what a pain in the ass it would be to butcher and cook a baby. I know they were literally starving but there is NO meat on those things! Especially from undernourished mothers.
I thought Yona and the boy were the single last living humans on earth? I thought they were going for an Adam and Eve cliche, but there is no way they have the skills to survive.
Ohh weren’t there more people on the train in cryo tubes?
Guess I’ll add my turd to the pile. I watched it a couple of nights ago and thought it was awful. (And yes, IMDb forum cinéastes, I realize that it was an allegory. I still have the dents in my skull to prove it.)
It just seemed like a Korean B movie that they somehow convinced a bunch of non-Korean actors to participate in.
I guess for me the premise and set up was too stupid to bitch about, either roll with it or turn it off. I mean why not just kill the low class people? In the real world lower classes are exploited for profit by those above, in the movie they just mill around in a train car all day, why even waste time feeding them? Clearly no one in power cared, they execute innocent lower class people all the time.
Are the people in the nightclub car doing that 24/7? Where do they sleep or poop or…
See? Once you dig in there is no bottom.
But it’s an allegory.
There’s something I’ve wondered - does a realistic, believable story somehow diminish the strength of an allegory? Or can a text be well-written at both the explicit and implicit levels?
My opinion is that a competent writer can write an allegory that also works as a allegory-free story. It takes more work, though, which is why few allegorists bother.
I thought its value as a thought-provoking story was almost totally diminished by how contrived it came across.
Why a train, for example? All the energy it took to keep that thing moving continuously would’ve been better spent on other things, like growing food and heating a stationary building underground. All it would take is a couple of boulders on the rails for all of humanity to be wasted in a derailment, and a genius came up with this plan?
The same story could’ve been told in a more practical setting.
I think the train was pre-existing to the apocalypse(I may be misremembering) so once the apocalypse occurred there was no ability to build another perpetual motion machine.
But why did it have to actually be moving? The train tracks would quickly fail in those conditions, debris would block their path, bridges would fail, etc. There was even that scene when ice was blocking the tracks and the resulting impact threw some of the wheels off the track. It seems like it would be much better to stay in one place than risk all that.
Well, they were getting their water through a scoop at the front. So the train may have to have been moving to make everything work.
I mean, sure, the premise is silly. But it was a fun movie, I liked it fine until the end. The end was insanely stupid. (Really, if the whole point is to make Captain America make a choice about what’s better for people, it’s really putting your thumb on the scale to have little kids as train parts. Choices are boring when it’s “heroes or monsters”.)
I assume the continued existence of the tail enders is because of the theoretical number of humans required to repopulate. Surely there’s an endgame in mind here - surely it is expected that the earth will eventually become inhabitable? Otherwise why bother? Of course saying “why bother” is easy when it isn’t you.
Just watched this tonight, and i’m afraid it really missed the mark for me.
I’m a huge fan of post-apocalyptic fiction, and i’ll nearly always give it every possible benefit of the doubt, but i just couldn’t buy into this one. The basic premise was interesting, and some of the individual scenes were compelling, but it just didn’t hang together.
Tilda Swinton’s character was hilariously bad, but she played it fantastically, as usual.
I watched it yesterday. It was okay, if formulaic. Tilda Swinton appeared to be playing a right-wing Janet Street-Porter.
I watched it last night and enjoyed it.
Sure, parts of it are just silly and stupid but I went in with very low expectations after seeing the trailers and it was actually better than I expected.
A decent way to kill 2 hours eating popcorn and brownies.
But if this is true, it wouldn’t make sense to keep the older tail enders around. They’d just be taking up space and resources that the breeders could use. It seems the only real reason they were kept alive is to contrive the narrative about how they sacrificed their arms to feed the masses. In a logical universe, they would have been slaughtered to feed the masses.
And frankly that was some bad cinematic storytelling - you should have seen a LOT of older people missing limbs and have assumed it was because of harsh putdowns of rebellion, and then found out later it was sacrifice.
I mean, clearly it’s not a movie that’s supposed to hold up to examination of the premise. I was okay with that. (But really, you’d think they’d be HAPPY to find out that the protein bars are made out of bugs and not dead humans.)
When we get to the scene where the protagonist discovers what their protein bars are made out of, I was expecting him to find human body parts in that cauldron. Instead, we get a gazillion roaches. Roaches. And based on his reaction, we’re supposed to find that shocking and disgusting. “Soylent green is people” is contrived, but considering the constraints of the train, it would have made a lot more sense. It also would have supported the allegory better.
They didn’t need all those tail-enders to produce children to keep the train running. All they needed was a couple of mating pairs, and all they’d have to do is keep them heavily drug addicted so they wouldn’t even notice their children being snatched from them. That then eliminates the need for all those armed guards. Unless the tail-enders were being put to work in some way not shown in the movie (maybe the ship’s laundry was in the tail end. Someone has to do the laundry, right?)
And the scientist in me couldn’t help wondering what they were feeding all those roaches. The table scraps of the rich? Okay, but why not take out the middle man and feed the table scraps to the lowly? That is the efficient way. That too fits the allegory better: the poor eats the rich’s cast offs.
I could’ve swallowed the plot better if they’d left it to audience to imagine how the food supply work. It jumped the shark by spelling things out with implausibilities. Like, the rich ate beef from real slaughtered cattle? Apparently farmed on the train? At least make that shit vat grown. Come on now.
No, they “explained” this. They need the low classes because the train is breaking down and only children can replace the complex mechanical parts in the engine. (And by replace, they’re not saying “put in a replacement part” they mean “this child will now use his hand to do the job of that broken piston.”)
:smack:
As you say, there is no bottom. They started off with a turd and tried to cover the imperfections with bullshit. No matter how deep they pile it, it’s still crap.
And that is a shame because from a technical perspective - acting, sets, camera work, etc. - it’s remarkably well done. There’s just only so much turd-polishing that you can do.
Watched it tonight. I was entertained. The premise was rock-stupid but, as said by others, it was adequately well paced and had its moments of humor and absurdity (submachine gun wielding pregnant Allison Pill looking like she fell out of Pleasantville).
I assumed the people clubbing were celebrating the new year and that they didn’t just party 24/7. But, when I think about it, I doubt they were gainfully employed either so who knows. As also noted, an apex predator like a polar bear would suggest an entire functioning ecosystem carrying on in a world where supposedly everything was extinct.
I don’t regret watching it but I wouldn’t enthusiastically recommend it either.