Back at the beginning of the summer one of my relatives recommended this movie to me.\u00a0 He\u2019s a sci-fi fan but of course tastes vary.\u00a0 Well anyway, I watched it last week and it was bizarre.\u00a0 The premise of the movie is basically ridiculous.\u00a0 As a way to combat global warming, humans treat the atmosphere of earth with a chemical that ends up plunging them into an ice age.\u00a0 The temperature drop is so severe that all human life is destroyed except for a tiny remnant that lives on a train that constantly circles the planet.\u00a0 This is the eponymous \u201cSnowpiercer.\u201d\u00a0 So, this is the first problem with the movie.\u00a0 If the earth was becoming cold and uninhabitable would you build a train as a refuge?\u00a0 I would think that an insulated bunker somewhere near the equator would make sense.\u00a0 Or something under the ocean would remain warm for centuries.\u00a0 It\u2019s just a ridiculous idea.<\/p>\n
Put the inconceivable nature of the premise aside and let\u2019s look at the story.\u00a0 The train has a population that is stratified by position on the train.\u00a0 The back cars of the train are inhabited by the wretched refuse who are crowded into cattle cars and fed protein concentrate bars that look like sludge.\u00a0 Moving forward the environment and the inhabitants become progressively more fortunate until by the front few cars we have the elite who live in luxury and eat delicacies like sushi and fresh fruit.\u00a0 The proles in the rear are controlled by armed guards and punished for infractions with barbaric violence.\u00a0 When a man whose child is taken away by one of the rulers throws his shoe at her we see an example of this.\u00a0 For this offense, his arm is exposed through a gasketed aperture in the side of the train to the frigid gale whipping past the train.\u00a0 After eleven minutes, his arm is brought back in and struck with a sledge hammer.\u00a0 The arm shatters like one of those rubber balls that\u2019s been dipped in liquid nitrogen and bounced off the floor.\u00a0 That\u2019ll teach him!<\/p>\n
The majority of the movie is the chronicle of the revolt of the proles and their battle to reach the front of the train and conquer their overlords.\u00a0 Along the way we see details of how the ecosystem of the Snowpiercer works.\u00a0 The prole food is revoltingly produced while the elite have whole car lengths of aquariums full of rare fish and rain forests of plant life to produce food and purify the water.\u00a0 We also get some of the back story to explain how the proles became so downtrodden and the greater horrors that transpired when they first entered into the train.\u00a0 The details are horrific and make you wonder why these people even bothered to keep struggling.<\/p>\n
And finally, the climax occurs when the proles reach the engine.\u00a0 At this point we learn the answer to how this train maintains the balance between life and death.\u00a0 And we meet the engineer, Ed Harris, who charms us into seeing his point of view.\u00a0 And of course, the movie ends on a catastrophic reversal that resolves the whole thing.<\/p>\n
So, is it any good?\u00a0 Parts of it are interesting and some of the characters are fun to watch.\u00a0 I especially enjoy Tilda Swinton as the schoolmarmish sadist who has the man\u2019s armed frozen off.\u00a0 She\u2019s quite demented fun.\u00a0 But I\u2019d say as a movie it\u2019s just too jumbled a mixture of action, sci-fi and human drama to recommend.\u00a0 It\u2019s just too nuts.\u00a0 But maybe there is an audience out there for this.\u00a0 But it\u2019s not me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back at the beginning of the summer one of my relatives recommended this movie to me.\u00a0 He\u2019s a sci-fi fan but of course tastes vary.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239,237,4,243],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","category-reviews","category-sff","category-sff-movie-reviews"],"yoast_head":"\n