Snowpiercer
I saw Snowpiercer this weekend. All I knew was that it is about a dystopian future where a global ice age has confined all of humanity to a single train, by the guy who made The Host (the Korean one), and that it has a 93% Fresh Rating on RottenTomatoes.
The Fresh Rating was all I cared about, really, so after my friends refused to go with, I took myself off to see it by myself.
Boy, was that a mistake.
That Fresh rating is inexplicable, because this movie fails at almost every task critical to storytelling. It's such a colossal failure it's an almost impossibly unwieldy task to unravel. This is a movie deserving of Plinkett's ire, and while I am not equal to *that* task, I will do my best to deconstruct its failings as I may:
First, Snowpiercer's basic premise - humanity's attempt to reverse global warming has sent the planet into a brutal ice age where (we're informed by prologue text) "all life is extinct," save for a single continuously operating self-sustaining globe-circling train carrying humanity's survivors - fails completely, right out of the station (heh), as the mechanics of how the train operates are distractingly unbelievable.
Because it's literally just a *train,* people. It has a fancy sci-fi engine, but it runs on absolutely standard train tracks. Which begs the question: What happens when snow and/or ice builds up over the tracks (as one would expect during a global ice age)? Well, the conductors shout "everybody hang on!" and the train just barrels into the blockage. No missiles or heat-rays or anything - the engine literally just collides with whatever is on the track. In fact, a CGI shot of the underside of the carriage during one of these events pointedly shows sections of the train so destabilized by the collision that it rocks up over on to two wheels before crashing down onto the track again.
We're expected to believe that this has been happening for *17 years* without catastrophic failure, even though the train takes a full year to circle the track. We're asked to go along with the premise that a *full* *year* isn't enough for any ice storm, glacier, rock slide, or avalanche to make the track impassable even in the steepest alpine terrain. And here comes a spoiler: The only way to cause an avalanche is to ignite an explosion big enough to blow a door off the train but not so big you kill everybody within 30 feet of the blast zone. A small explosion, in other words, is all that has ever set off a natural disaster along the global length of icy track.
That's dumb, but it might have been forgivable (or at least ignorable) if the characters had been engaging. But alas, in a complete flouting of basic character development, the screenplay keeps the protagonists deliberately inscrutable until the last 10 minutes of the film, when a weepy monologue about our hero's past trauma provoked smothered laughter in my theater and a "twist" revelation of betrayal by another character provoked eye-rolling by me. We aren't given any insight into the protagonists as *people* early in the film. All we see is that their living conditions are intolerable. When the revelations about their memories come, it's much too late to inform their past actions in any meaningful way.
But what's worse is that the movie's absolute and universal lack of insight into human nature renders the villains into foppish, cartoonish sadistic puppets. Their motivations for spending precious energy and exceedingly limited resources to cruelly abuse the refugees in their care is not only impractical, but functionally suicidal.
The movie pointedly and repeatedly indicates that the owner of the train, Wilford, has formalized a classist societal structure as a kind of divine right of kings: those wealthy people who boarded the train as first-class passengers are entitled to enjoy their opulent and exclusive luxury privileges (saunas, sushi, gardens, etc.) in perpetuity, presumably without doing any labor at all...ever. The coach passengers enjoy comfortable living. Employees work. The refugees who boarded for free live in filthy, claustrophobic ghettos, aren't allotted any of the train's more than adequate water supply to bathe, and were - spoiler warning again - literally starved into cannibalism the first several months of their journey, for no reason at all, just until Wilford finally decided to feed them. While first class passengers dine on chicken and beef and lovingly-tended fresh produce, the refugees are fed weird gelatinous protein blocks and nothing else.
And as far as I can see, the refugees, much like the upper class, don't have *jobs*. They don't actually do anything on the train, except suffer. They aren't critical to the survival of the first class or coach passengers, except for - spoiler warning again - two or three refugee children that are brought forward because they're small enough to work in the engine compartments. The refugee adults are living on charity, but they're living in hellish conditions, with no path forward and no hope of improvement save through violent revolution. And they've only been at it for 17 years, which means everybody 30 years and older vividly remembers how society *used* to function and has reason to be pissed.
So...why?
There is no internally consistent why - because the movie is - *GASP!* - primarily an allegory about our own brutally capitalistic classist caste system! And of course, in our society, those that have are universally sadists who abuse and oppress those that have not, just for fun, even at dire risk to themselves.
Except, fuck you, movie. Your insight into human nature is so profoundly flawed that your evil overlords don't bother to take any of the logical steps necessary to maintain their power. Or even their lives.
Because you don't violently systematically abuse your underclass when you're *running out of bullets.*
No, the way to prevent an underclass from revolting is to give them *just* *enough* to make them fearful of any loss. Provide lotteries or lottery-like career options to maintain a sense of hope that if the refugees go along with the system and work hard, they'll be rewarded. So you need the refugees to provide a steady stream of children small enough to work in the engine compartment? That's easy! Don't mysteriously and ominously rip the kids away from their parents without explanation, upsetting the entire refugee population. Instead, richly reward the child's family for the child's service. If working in the engine is a shitty, dangerous job, make the rewards irresistible. Make the parents desperate to provide their child for *your* needs.
But most of all, if you're the mastermind of this classist society, intent on maintaining the train's capitalistic caste system, but *also* intent on maintaining the population, as there's not really much room for growth, don't do that by *deliberately* *fomenting* *violent* *revolts* that kill people of all classes and even (spoiler warning) tempt morons into blowing the entire train off the track.
No, jackass! Put your capitalistic philosophy to actual use: Highly incentivize voluntary suicide. Highly incentivize childlessness. Then put your draconian power at play: Minimize medical intervention, liberally execute lawbreakers, and, if worse comes to worse, save your bullets for if and when you need to engage in wholesale slaughter to reset the system.
Snowpiercer's screenplay was clumsy, lazy, and so smugly assured of its political correct view of humanity that it didn't bother to be plausible and it didn't bother to be about humanity on any level at all.
And that's just the failings of the biggest themes in its *screenplay.* There's a lot more that's wrong with this movie.
The CGI is terrible, the action sequences are jerky, uninspired, and not always in spatial reality (including people magically resurrecting from fatal injuries!), the dialogue is alternately woodenly expository or artificially poetic, and -
Oh God, I can't spend any more time on this. Let me jump to the end:
After a daffy supporting protagonist lights off an explosion that sets off an avalanche that derails the train, a teenage girl and a little refugee kid rescued from the engine compartment step out onto the snow. The movie set up in its first scene that the outdoors is utterly unsurvivable; bodies freeze liquid-nitrogen solid in 7 minutes outside of the train. But whatever, one of the characters hypothesized that the world was getting slightly warmer and it turned out he was right.
So the kids stand on the snow, outside of the train for the first time in their lives, and the look up the snowy banks to the crest of a mountain. A polar bear scrambles over the edge of the hill, exchanges a significant look with the kids and then ambles away.
A FUCKING POLAR BEAR. In a world where "all life is extinct," not according to a *character*, who could be misinformed, but according to the expository text card before the movie begins.
FFFFUUUUUCCKKKK YYOOOOUUUUU MOOOOOVIEEEE!
But the saddest thing is that there is a way this movie could have saved itself in that last second: Have the polar bear heft up a tub of popcorn and pop the cap off a bottle of Coco-Cola ™ and wink at the audience. Get it?! Because you oppressed refugees bought into the capitalistic machinations of marketing and media, and you just paid to have this movie systematically oppress your intelligence.
Drink Coco-Cola ™, suckers!
The Fresh Rating was all I cared about, really, so after my friends refused to go with, I took myself off to see it by myself.
Boy, was that a mistake.
That Fresh rating is inexplicable, because this movie fails at almost every task critical to storytelling. It's such a colossal failure it's an almost impossibly unwieldy task to unravel. This is a movie deserving of Plinkett's ire, and while I am not equal to *that* task, I will do my best to deconstruct its failings as I may:
First, Snowpiercer's basic premise - humanity's attempt to reverse global warming has sent the planet into a brutal ice age where (we're informed by prologue text) "all life is extinct," save for a single continuously operating self-sustaining globe-circling train carrying humanity's survivors - fails completely, right out of the station (heh), as the mechanics of how the train operates are distractingly unbelievable.
Because it's literally just a *train,* people. It has a fancy sci-fi engine, but it runs on absolutely standard train tracks. Which begs the question: What happens when snow and/or ice builds up over the tracks (as one would expect during a global ice age)? Well, the conductors shout "everybody hang on!" and the train just barrels into the blockage. No missiles or heat-rays or anything - the engine literally just collides with whatever is on the track. In fact, a CGI shot of the underside of the carriage during one of these events pointedly shows sections of the train so destabilized by the collision that it rocks up over on to two wheels before crashing down onto the track again.
We're expected to believe that this has been happening for *17 years* without catastrophic failure, even though the train takes a full year to circle the track. We're asked to go along with the premise that a *full* *year* isn't enough for any ice storm, glacier, rock slide, or avalanche to make the track impassable even in the steepest alpine terrain. And here comes a spoiler: The only way to cause an avalanche is to ignite an explosion big enough to blow a door off the train but not so big you kill everybody within 30 feet of the blast zone. A small explosion, in other words, is all that has ever set off a natural disaster along the global length of icy track.
That's dumb, but it might have been forgivable (or at least ignorable) if the characters had been engaging. But alas, in a complete flouting of basic character development, the screenplay keeps the protagonists deliberately inscrutable until the last 10 minutes of the film, when a weepy monologue about our hero's past trauma provoked smothered laughter in my theater and a "twist" revelation of betrayal by another character provoked eye-rolling by me. We aren't given any insight into the protagonists as *people* early in the film. All we see is that their living conditions are intolerable. When the revelations about their memories come, it's much too late to inform their past actions in any meaningful way.
But what's worse is that the movie's absolute and universal lack of insight into human nature renders the villains into foppish, cartoonish sadistic puppets. Their motivations for spending precious energy and exceedingly limited resources to cruelly abuse the refugees in their care is not only impractical, but functionally suicidal.
The movie pointedly and repeatedly indicates that the owner of the train, Wilford, has formalized a classist societal structure as a kind of divine right of kings: those wealthy people who boarded the train as first-class passengers are entitled to enjoy their opulent and exclusive luxury privileges (saunas, sushi, gardens, etc.) in perpetuity, presumably without doing any labor at all...ever. The coach passengers enjoy comfortable living. Employees work. The refugees who boarded for free live in filthy, claustrophobic ghettos, aren't allotted any of the train's more than adequate water supply to bathe, and were - spoiler warning again - literally starved into cannibalism the first several months of their journey, for no reason at all, just until Wilford finally decided to feed them. While first class passengers dine on chicken and beef and lovingly-tended fresh produce, the refugees are fed weird gelatinous protein blocks and nothing else.
And as far as I can see, the refugees, much like the upper class, don't have *jobs*. They don't actually do anything on the train, except suffer. They aren't critical to the survival of the first class or coach passengers, except for - spoiler warning again - two or three refugee children that are brought forward because they're small enough to work in the engine compartments. The refugee adults are living on charity, but they're living in hellish conditions, with no path forward and no hope of improvement save through violent revolution. And they've only been at it for 17 years, which means everybody 30 years and older vividly remembers how society *used* to function and has reason to be pissed.
So...why?
There is no internally consistent why - because the movie is - *GASP!* - primarily an allegory about our own brutally capitalistic classist caste system! And of course, in our society, those that have are universally sadists who abuse and oppress those that have not, just for fun, even at dire risk to themselves.
Except, fuck you, movie. Your insight into human nature is so profoundly flawed that your evil overlords don't bother to take any of the logical steps necessary to maintain their power. Or even their lives.
Because you don't violently systematically abuse your underclass when you're *running out of bullets.*
No, the way to prevent an underclass from revolting is to give them *just* *enough* to make them fearful of any loss. Provide lotteries or lottery-like career options to maintain a sense of hope that if the refugees go along with the system and work hard, they'll be rewarded. So you need the refugees to provide a steady stream of children small enough to work in the engine compartment? That's easy! Don't mysteriously and ominously rip the kids away from their parents without explanation, upsetting the entire refugee population. Instead, richly reward the child's family for the child's service. If working in the engine is a shitty, dangerous job, make the rewards irresistible. Make the parents desperate to provide their child for *your* needs.
But most of all, if you're the mastermind of this classist society, intent on maintaining the train's capitalistic caste system, but *also* intent on maintaining the population, as there's not really much room for growth, don't do that by *deliberately* *fomenting* *violent* *revolts* that kill people of all classes and even (spoiler warning) tempt morons into blowing the entire train off the track.
No, jackass! Put your capitalistic philosophy to actual use: Highly incentivize voluntary suicide. Highly incentivize childlessness. Then put your draconian power at play: Minimize medical intervention, liberally execute lawbreakers, and, if worse comes to worse, save your bullets for if and when you need to engage in wholesale slaughter to reset the system.
Snowpiercer's screenplay was clumsy, lazy, and so smugly assured of its political correct view of humanity that it didn't bother to be plausible and it didn't bother to be about humanity on any level at all.
And that's just the failings of the biggest themes in its *screenplay.* There's a lot more that's wrong with this movie.
The CGI is terrible, the action sequences are jerky, uninspired, and not always in spatial reality (including people magically resurrecting from fatal injuries!), the dialogue is alternately woodenly expository or artificially poetic, and -
Oh God, I can't spend any more time on this. Let me jump to the end:
After a daffy supporting protagonist lights off an explosion that sets off an avalanche that derails the train, a teenage girl and a little refugee kid rescued from the engine compartment step out onto the snow. The movie set up in its first scene that the outdoors is utterly unsurvivable; bodies freeze liquid-nitrogen solid in 7 minutes outside of the train. But whatever, one of the characters hypothesized that the world was getting slightly warmer and it turned out he was right.
So the kids stand on the snow, outside of the train for the first time in their lives, and the look up the snowy banks to the crest of a mountain. A polar bear scrambles over the edge of the hill, exchanges a significant look with the kids and then ambles away.
A FUCKING POLAR BEAR. In a world where "all life is extinct," not according to a *character*, who could be misinformed, but according to the expository text card before the movie begins.
FFFFUUUUUCCKKKK YYOOOOUUUUU MOOOOOVIEEEE!
But the saddest thing is that there is a way this movie could have saved itself in that last second: Have the polar bear heft up a tub of popcorn and pop the cap off a bottle of Coco-Cola ™ and wink at the audience. Get it?! Because you oppressed refugees bought into the capitalistic machinations of marketing and media, and you just paid to have this movie systematically oppress your intelligence.
Drink Coco-Cola ™, suckers!