I’ve been putting off starting a thread for nominations for the worst movie premise within the constraints of that movie’s world.
My addition would have been Snowpiercer. The world has become a frozen wasteland and you have invented a perpetual machine/energy source and your great idea is to use it to power a train driving forever through the frozen world rather than do something sensible like digging into the side of a mountain and setting up the survivors there.
Imagine my surprise to find out it is being turned into a TV series.
I’ll just view it (and the movie) as taking place on a spaceship on a generational voyage through a cold and unforgiving void that has developed a highly-stratified class structure and try to forget the basic silliness of it being on a train. In that light, it might make for more interesting viewing, certainly a lot sexier and better-acted, than a somewhat similar short-lived 1973 series called The Starlost.
The movie was…alright I guess. I’ve certainly sat through way worse. But having said that, I don’t see any reason to see it again. And a series seems completely unnecessary.
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Yet, for some reason (self loathing, perhaps?) I think I might watch it…
Apparently in the future there is some miraculous technology that makes train maintenance and refuelling superfluous. Okaaay. And the track is made of adamantium or mithril or something, I guess.
But midway through the movie we learn that not only does the track span the globe, it has so many twists and turns that it takes a year to do a complete round! Conservative guesstimate of speed: 120 km/h. That means the track is at least a million km!
I loved the film - it had the same feeling as other French scifi dystopian cinema, and it struck the right balance for me - it ignored realism enough to make it clear that the story was an allegorical conceit, but it grounded the fun stuff - beautiful renditions of the set design for each car.
I’m not sure how that would work for a series, especially a more open ended one. The network seems fairly confident, I think it already got a renewal.
It’s an interesting enough premise to see if they’re clever enough to tweak it for ongoing, and even if not, there’s also potential if it’s terrible and absurd enough to be entertaining in the bad way. And there’s even some possibility in it from the “fictional tiny house of the week” angle.
I’m going to check it out at least. Just the fact that this idea was greenlit is encouraging. Could be a disaster, maybe even a beautiful disaster, could be great, whatever, it’s not likely to be quickly boring.
If you need to do some rail-based futuristic sci-fi, and can’t drink enough to make Snowpiercer work for you, then you can always try the China Mieville novel RailSea. Its not bad. Nowhere near his best work, and silly enough, but about half a bottle of vodka more plausible than Snowpiercer.
The movie was ok if you just saw it as an allegory, like JackDaVinci proposed. But it never made any sense, and trying to get deeper into it will make even less sense. Then again there are three more volumes in the Comic Series, so maybe there is more to tell?
You have to work up to a level where you can handle Snowpiercer. You have to practice, build your tolerance, develop certain conditioned responses, increase your knowledge of the genre, improve your understanding, study the topic, cultivate your comprehension and generally whip yourself into mental shape. There’s gotta be a single word to describe all this, I’ll try to think of it.
Well, I loved the movie, which is why I’m aghast to see a series coming. It’ll probably ruin it for me. A weird comic-book like movie like that needs to stand alone.
China Mieville must’ve been really fond of his trainset when he was a kid, since he also wrote the train-centered “Iron council”. I read it sober and enjoyed it, but if i have to I would rate it two glasses of gin.
As someone said in the original Snowpiercer thread, it was as close as we’re ever going to get to a Bioshock movie. And it had Captain America lamenting that he knows what babies taste like. So it was a thumbs up for those aspects alone.
I found it hard to suspend my disbelief for Snowpiercer. It might have worked better if it was openly an absurdist fantasy instead of wearing a thin scifi coat. I liked one theory that Snowpiercer is secretly a sequel to Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Why SNOWPIERCER is a sequel to WILLY WONKA AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY: - YouTube
