Snowpiercer is a dystopian sci-fi movie directed by Bong Joon Ho and starring Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, Ed Harris, John Hurt, Octavia Spencer, Jamie Bell, Ko Asung, Allison Pill, Marcanthonee Reis, and Song Kang-ho.
In the not so distant future, humanity's attempts to fix climate change results in the world being plunged into an icy hellscape in which no life can survive (look, at least they tried). The last survivors of humanity live aboard a train that runs constantly, completing a one-year loop around Europe and Asia. Passengers in the tail of the train are essentially prisoners, eating protein bars made of bugs and relegated to tiny bunks, and counted every day like cattle. There have been rebellions in the past as the tail passengers try to make their way forward, where first-class passengers live in opulence, but they've always bloodily failed, and the whole thing is ruled by the mysterious Wilford (Harris), which the train looks at as a messianic figure.
Curtis (Evans) is a tail passenger who leads a rebellion with the help of Gilliam (Hurt), one of the train's designers, now stuck in the tail missing most of his limbs. He looks after a young man named Edgar (Bell), who views him as a father figure, despite Curtis' insistence that he's neither a leader nor a good man. The rebellion moves forward and most of the passengers get killed along the way (including Edgar, whom Curtis sacrifices to captured Mason (Swinton), a train higher-up to get him further along in the train), but manages to recruit Namgoong Minsoo (Kang-ho) and his daughter Yona (Asung). Minsoo designed the security doors for the train and can therefore open them, for the price of lumps of addictive chemical waste called kronole.
In the end, Curtis makes it to the head and confronts Wilford, and learns that the whole rebellion - all the rebellions - have been set up to ensure the train's ruling class have a reason to slaughter the underclass sometimes and keep the population in balance. Now Wilford wants Curtis, who's lost everything, to become the train's new leader/god. And Curtis seems on the verge of accepting, until he realizes that the train only runs because Wilford has been pressing young children into service in the bowels of the train, using them as parts because the actual parts no longer exist, and that's about when Curtis says "fuck it" and lets Minsoo blow the whole thing off the rails.
This movie is brutal as hell. It's not just that no one has plot armor (well, Kona kinda does), but it's that a lot of the deaths of important secondary characters don't get a lot of drama. Gilliam is executed over a video feed; Tanya (Spencer), whose young son Tim (Reis) was taken to be a cog, dies in a fight so quickly it's easy to miss; even Edgar, who does have a pivotal role in the story, barely gets a lingering shot before he dies. The themes of the movie - everything is a cog in a machine that is inexorably breaking down - come through pretty clearly just from that.
The production design is fucking amazing, and watching it again I'm a little surprised it didn't get any Oscar noms (Bong Joon Ho, of course, would later wind a bunch of Oscars for Parasite) for that or screenplay. A few points don't hold up - if all life froze, where did the polar bears come from? Why does Edgar have an Irish accent if Curtis raised him? Why is Curtis built like Captain America if he's lived his life with poor nutrition? Why can't we see more of Luke Pasqualino's character Grey, who is a fucking badass who deserves his own movie? But all of that is nitpicky; it's not meant to be hard sci-fi anyway.
Also, I remembered I haven't seen Okja or The Host yet, so I need to get on that, because Bong's movies are fantastic.
My Grade: A
Rewatch Value: Medium
Next up: So I Married An Ax Murderer
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