Seventeen years ago, an experiment to stop global warming went disastrously wrong and resulted in a new ice age that wiped out all life on earth. Humanity’s only survivors are those living aboard a perpetually travelling, over-engineered trans-global train, the titular Snowpiercer, within which a rigidly stratified class society has developed. In the cramped squalor of the train’s rear, where the lower classes live, a revolution is brewing.
You may well have heard more about the war over Snowpiercer’s editing than the film itself, where Harvey Weinstein wanted to bring the film in line with a standard Hollywood actioner by hacking out 20 minutes of character development and bookending the film with explanatory voiceovers, but now that Snowpiercer has been revealed in its uncut glory, the full depth of Bong Joon-ho’s vision can be fully appreciated.
Although the plot is (quite literally) a linear one, the rebels’ advancement up the train feels like a logical progression of the story, with every advancement taking them further from the grimy, windowless misery of the rear, through the bright expanse of the middle and towards the hedonistic decadence of the front. Each new carriage brings new surprises and dangers, while also revealing a little more about the history of the motorised world the characters inhabit and the arctic wasteland outside it. A religious-like fervour has developed around the train’s very existence, with the “sacred engine practically worshipped as some mechanical deity under whose eternal blessing the passengers reside, and its mysterious designer and engineer Wilford taking the dual role of prophet and saviour.
In a film packed with recognisable faces, a stand out performance comes from Tilda Swinton, magnificent as a particularly odious overseer and the closest thing the microcosmic dystopian society has to middle management a thick Yorkshire accent deliberately at odds with the privileged stratum she belongs to. Chris Evans certainly looks the part of the hero thanks to bulking up for Captain America, but rebellion leader Curtis is far from a mere iteration of the star spangled Avenger. Reluctant and stoic, he only takes command of the rebels because nobody else is capable of doing so, while some late revelations of what those in the rear of the train initially did to survive shed some light upon why he was so averse to being seen as a leader, and will almost certainly alter your perception of him.
Although there is little in the way of moral ambiguity, the film still manages to avoid the kind of character clichés that make many similar action films so repetitive, and also creates a world in which things like this could genuinely occur, where life is so desolate and empty people forget events only a few years past. When a story’s heroes essentially amount to a reformed thug, an impetuous young man, two vengeful parents and a drug-addled security expert, while its villains genuinely believe the horrific abuse they inflict is both justified and necessary, it really makes you want to properly understand the inner workings of the society that shaped them.
A few sickening moments really bring this home, such as when we discover precisely what the protein bars on which the rear passengers live are actually made from, or corporal punishment involving an arm held outside the train to freeze as though dipped in liquid nitrogen before being shattered with hammers. Life, like the film itself, is dark, unflinching and violent, and the only hope you have is that which you make for yourself.
Overall Verdict: Balancing action with story and populating it with complex characters, Snowpiercer is the kind of film you wish Hollywood would make more often. Hopefully its UK release won’t be too long in coming.
Reviewer: Andrew Marshall