DMZ does the movies: Snowpiercer
* It’s bleak, it’s bloody, it’s gorgeous. Seriously, such a dark - in tone and palette - film and yet it is so visually sumptuous.
* It starts with dread and ends with hope. The thing of it is that both are so warped and macabre that it takes you a minute or two to realize it. In the beginning, as we watch and wait for the countdown of the seven minutes for Andy’s arm to freeze solid, it’s surreal - Mason gives her ridiculous lecture about the shoe, complete with trying to fill time, and we and the tail section people are just waiting for that cartoon clock around Andy’s neck to chime so that this horrible thing can happen. There’s a weight to that time, different units for everyone involved, but all can feel it in the pit of their stomachs. And then, at the end, as the story comes to its crash of a conclusion, sacrificing the most important characters along with most of the train’s population to let us know that the apocalypse is over. This is a happy ending for there is a polar bear!
There was a fair bit of “...wait, what?” in the line for the ladies’ room at the Angelika after the movie.
* This isn't quite the liberal/progressive triumphalist movie some liberal/progressives would have you think. I've seen all kinds of snide references in newspaper reviews, including one about the Koch brothers, and, well, I don't quite see it that way. I'm sure there's a marxist interpretation for events, but this isn't The Purge. It has more to do with classic liberalism than anything going on MSNBC today and the only real environmental message is that George Carlin was right. :)
* It is significantly different than the graphic novel, although obviously based on Le Transperceneige. It’s faithful to the concept, absolutely, but some of the changes they made are interesting.
First, Bong Joon-ho and Kelly Masterson made it a group effort while removing an important character - and thus jettisoning all of the romantic subplot. The first book of the GN is the story of Proloff, a tail section denizen who has been captured after trying to sneak forward on the outside of the train, and what happens to him after he is thrown together with Adeline, an idealistic middle-class social activist for the tail section people. Although I should say it’s the other way around; Adeline is incarcerated with Proloff mostly by making a nuisance of herself to the functionaries and partially because the Snowpiercer government is necessarily hyper-vigilant about disease and they are quarantined together on suspicion of contagion, heads shaved and bodies examined. Their progress to the front of the train and what happens when they get there is the story of the first book.
Proloff has more or less become Curtis, Chris Evans’s character. There is no analog for Adeline, no advocate for the disadvantaged at all, no sympathy or curiosity for the tail section at all. The train’s society has been simplified somewhat, by necessity in almost all cases to make it easier to translate to film. The GN’s society is more nuanced, a bit more… Weimar Republic. The film’s society is much more explicitly hedonist, visual shorthand for what the tail section folks don’t have. But while the film is utterly gorgeous, even in its ugliness, I would have sacrificed a visual or two to show some of those nuances, say the efforts made by individuals to preserve libraries of books and LPs and other cultural artifacts, or the way the folks who worship the engine as a deity are mocked.
Because this is an ensemble film to start with, there is more attention paid to the tail section and the people therein in the movie; Bong has to set up his characters so we’ll care about them moving forward. In the GN, Proloff has already escaped the rear and what we see of it is largely what he tells us and it’s mostly at the beginning, when everyone is asking why he risked so much for so little reward and he says that nobody can understand how bad it is back there. An example given for how bleak life is back in the tail is thus: an old man is given a great and precious gift for his birthday, an hour of privacy, something nobody has experienced since boarding. And what does he do with it? He hangs himself.
The film, by contrast, is a little more gentle, introducing us to an impoverished community stripped of dignity and treated like chattel, but it is a community with heart. It’s nowhere you would want to be, absolutely, but there are bonds of amity and family, children born and loved, a little bit of art, and tiny pinpricks of light in the darkness - it is the extinguishing of each individual light that breaks Curtis ever more as he moves forward. It’s only at the end that Curtis reveals the depth of the depravity that had been, how everyone including himself has been changed by it in soul-deep ways, and why everyone chose death over the status quo.
* That scene, by the way, is perfectly placed. Curtis has spent the story as the unquestioned rebellion leader who does not want the responsibility because he doesn’t feel worthy compared to his mentor, Gilliam, whom he considers himself a proxy for and hopes to install as the train leader for the betterment of everyone. Curtis is presented as a traditional reluctant hero, unaware of his virtues that everyone else can see, competent and obviously worthy, but plagued by self-doubt and daunted by the responsibility of what his future might be should he succeed. Like Aragorn. We have seen Curtis act kindly, gentle with children and the delicate adults. We have seen him be resolute, keeping his own courage and rallying others. We have seen him be humorous, both when he censors the ingredients of the protein bars and then, unintentionally, when he slips on the fish and you get that glimpse of “really? I made it this far to slip on a fucking fish?” in his expression. We have seen him make impossible choices, such as when he sacrificed Edgar for the revolution. And we have seen him grieve as the weight of that leadership, made official after the murder of Gilliam, grows heavier with each death.
But then Curtis reframes everything with his tale of the cannibalism of the earliest days, of the feral Lord of the Flies societal breakdown that accompanied the birth of their new world. And it starts off with a tale of the greatness of Gilliam, his mentor, before Curtis confesses his sins. Curtis is on a mission of redemption, he is serving a penance for his sins against the people he led into battle and who died under his banner. His sacrifice of Edgar was, in effect, the continuation of an act begun eighteen years ago - he started killing Edgar when he was a baby and only now has the deed been completed. He loses his shit on the bridge because he has been carrying this weight around for so long and he can never, ever complete that penance because there is no one left to offer absolution.
There’s probably an argument to be made that Curtis shouldn’t be carrying all of that guilt. He was seventeen, a liminal age between childhood and adulthood, in a time of immense societal upheaval - societal breakdown, a dissolution so complete that people killed other people for food. He lived through the apocalypse. He had no family, he had no guidance save for the pack he’d fallen in with, and all he did have was the one asset that mattered back then: strength. But even then, when confronted by decency, he backed down, re-embraced societal norms, and reformed. He’s been a model citizen since and nobody seems to be holding any grudges despite most being old enough to remember what he’d done. Quite the opposite; he’s a civic leader.
The thing of it is, there’s probably an argument, but nobody makes it. Neither Gilliam, who knew the story all along, nor Namgoong, who hears it at the end, give him either comfort or condemnation. You could say it’s because both men are using him, one to perpetuate the status quo and the other to destroy it. You could say it’s because in such a post-apocalyptic environment, Curtis’s crimes are not that shocking. Whatever the reason, neither man changes Curtis’s course, leaving it up to Curtis himself, and there’s a beauty to that.
All the more so because of what comes after that, after his story is reframed a second time, by Wilford, when he is in effect told that his rehabilitation was nothing more than careful grooming so that he could enable the system that destroyed him to continue eternally. He is the grown-up version of the children kidnapped to serve as parts for the train. And it is then that Curtis is galvanized into completing his penance in terms he can accept: he sacrifices his body to save another, to fulfill a promise to Tanya. The act he could not offer eighteen years ago, he gives freely now and dies in grace.
Also posted at DW.