Film/TV Jun 25, 2014 at 4:00 am

Snowpiercer Is a Great Sci-Fi Film—Political, Beautiful, and Totally Committed

Starring Tilda Swinton and a perpetual-motion machine.

Comments

1
I wonder if Kim Jong Un's train is like this.
2
There's a Gene Wolfe short story that is related to this. 'On the train' originally in the New Yorker, later in his Best of... Collection.
3
Man. I saw this movie tonight based on your recommendation, and I'm very sorry that I did. This movie was all kinds of stupid. Nothing made any sense at all. Why are there so many super rich getting their hair done and dancing at raves, and so relatively few poor? On a planet where nothing except a train exists, where did their riches even come from? From trading the drug which is supposed to be so precious, and yet is lying around in great piles for the taking? Who was that Terminator guy leading the 20 minute fight scenes? How come the well-armed security forces suddenly ceased to exist? And why the hell did Ed Harris keep blabbing on and on and on and on? I thought I was going to fall asleep.

I find that you generally have good taste – even in B- movies – but man were you wrong on this one. Commitment shmomitment. Thumbs down for Snowpiercer.
4
I sadly have to agree, at least in spirit, with @1. My boyfriend and I were both excited to see this film based on the crazy amounts of hype and good press it had been receiving all over the place. I mean Tilda Swinton alone made us super excited! But then we downloaded it. And we watched it. And while my boyfriend thought it was a fun, campy (if poorly written and acted) mess I was just flabbergasted by the quality level of this movie in contrast to the praise that was being showered over it.

The writing was D-level here. Seriously. Every time anyone opened their mouth it felt like it was written by aliens trying to mimic our speech patterns. And while that worked for Tilda's crazy loon of a character (which was the only real highlight of the film for me) for everyone else it just came off as really, really bad writing. And the story? Really? I honestly need to blame the source material for this mess. Though there has to be blame placed upon the director for choosing said material I suppose. I liken it, in a sense, to another train book-to-movie: The Polar Express. Both are books whose stylized art and sequential nature allowed for such a heavy-handed, poorly thought-out, ultimately ridiculous plot without the reader constantly going "but how is any of this making any sense?!" In the case of the polar express it had a whimsy, and it's lack of dialogue and general plot, coupled with the softness found in the use of pastels for its art made for the perfect children's dream. For snow piercer, the art and obvious stylization and comic nature leant to the idea that this wasn't MEANT to depict a possible future reality but more of a fable- a cautionary tale that takes extreme liberties of what we know to be how basic science and logic works. Both of these stories also fall apart COMPLETELY when you then take those origins and attempt to translate them into something they are not- something far more "real" (in Snowpiercer's case live-action, in Polar Express's case a hideous motion-captured uncanny valley). And yet while I despised what they did to PS- I found Snowpiercer to be much more insulting to my intelligence because it appeared to be attempting to form a message about society or human nature or something that, when depicted with live actors and real sets, ends up sounding like it was written by a twelve-year-old with ADD. Nothing about the story, the characters, their motivations or the general setting and situation stood up to the kind of scrutiny that a live-action movie allows for. And it's tonal and logical mistakes only caused me to be so completely driven from the movie that by the end I laughed out loud at what I think was supposed to be a meaningful moment and a tragic scene.

In short this just baffled me how anyone could call this a "good," let alone "great" film. It was a mess with good sets, great actors, and a lot of effort that culminated in a really, really bad (poorly written and acted) movie where characters are oddly given screen time and built up for what appears to be no reason and the final conclusion feels just completely dumb. This was a futuristic dystopia written by an idiot and no manner of budget or cast could save that.
5
Woops- I meant @3. I agree in spirit with @3
6
This reviewer must have been doing some great drugs before seeing this movie. It's ok. I dropped some acid before seeing Passenger 57 and thought the movie was all kinds of awesome. I thought this movie was all kind s of terrible
7
The movie is ludicrous, but a fun sort of ludicrous. I would compare parts of it to the movie Brazil, other parts to the film adaptation of 1984 and then throw in some elements from 12 Monkeys. It comes off as a little disjointed and the premise demands a biblical amount of suspension of disbelief, but I found the acting and direction to be mostly competent. The set design and photography are absolutely first rate.
Sure, its not the best movie ever, but its not nearly as bad 3 and 4 make it sound. Judged strictly against its genre, I would give it a B-.
And I wasn't on acid. Hell, I wasn't even stoned.
8
Not to split hairs, but how is Atlas Shrugged science fiction? Do tell. Doesn't science fiction have to deal with imagined other worlds, or imagined other social structures/ technologies? There is nothing in Atlas Shrugged that isn't our world expect the individual people, who are ridiculously unreal personifications of Ayn Rand's dumb-ass social philosophy. Does this make it sci-fi? If it's genre fiction at all it's some sort of proto-neoliberal s&m Romance. She gets human nature so wrong that it seems like she's describing another world, but I think she's actually trying to describe ours. God I hate her so much.
9
I'm with the other commenters. This movie was ok, at best, and I subscribe wholeheartedly to damning by faint praise. The message is heavy handed, and often silly (while not intending to be silly, which is the worst kind of silly). The "won't anyone think of the children??" moments are just too much. The shooting the bullets through windows at opposite train cars around a corner was just plain stupid. Unrefined, unbalanced, anime-esk weirdness, masquerading as refinement, social commentary, and modern film making. Rent this movie, or better yet stream it online, and get stoned before you watch it.
10
What is the reasoning for why the entire population of the planet is on a train?

What prevents humans from not living on the train?
11
Best sci-fi movie I've seen since Moon (or Children of Men). Intriguing ending too.
12
sawr it.
nope.
13
All negative comments are coming from intellectually challenged people that don't understand a metaphore and what this movie represents.
All of you that are watching , you now belong in one of those those train "classes"...
There was even a comment about " why weren't people allowed to leave the train"...go figure what a dumb audience this movie had...
The movie was excellent, brilliant! ...a realistic portrait of our society, dark side....and where it could end if something or somebody doesn't stop this engine.
14
All negative comments are coming from intellectually challenged people that don't understand a metaphore and what this movie represents.
All of you that are watching , you now belong in one of those those train "classes"...
There was even a comment about " why weren't people allowed to leave the train"...go figure what a dumb audience this movie had...
The movie was excellent, brilliant! ...a realistic portrait of our society and it's dark side....and where it could end if something or somebody doesn't stop this engine.

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