Certification. 15
Running Time. 2 hours 6 mins
Director. Bong Joon Ho
Cast. Jamie Bell, Ewen Bremner, Chris Evans, Ed Harris, Song Kang Ho, John Hurt, Octavia Spencer, Tilda Swinton.
Rating. 69%
Visionary director Bong Joon Ho 2014's feature film, Snowpiercer is an adaptation of the long-running graphic novel series, Le Transperceneige created by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette.
The premise is exquisitely ingenious. Set in the year 2031, after a man-made global catastrophe - where scientists in an attempt to reverse global warming actually supercooled the planet - the remaining few thousand survivors are confined to a self-sustaining, and perpetually moving train, the Snowpiercer.
In this dystopian regime, the remaining survivors are neatly compartmentalised and confined to preordained railway carriages. Crammed into the rear of the train, the huddled masses eke out a meagre existence surviving on black, gelatinous, insect-based protein bars. Order, or oppression, is maintained by a combination of gleeful propaganda and brute force. Toward the front of the train, the more fortunate would appear to enjoy comfortable conditions with access to fresh food, schools, nightclubs, saunas and aquariums. The benefits of power and privilege. In the front carriage, alongside the self-sustaining engine, resides the near-mythical creator of the Snowpiercer, Wilford - an apparently benevolent premier.
The train serves as a linear allegory for the rigid constraints of class structure, an area Bong Joon Ho would explore again, more forensically in Parasite.
Tired of the oppression, impoverished conditions and dehumanisation by those in the forward carriages, the entire film focuses on an uprising and the fight to reach the front of the train. The action sequences are sensational. Crammed in the claustrophobic confines of carriages, the kinetic hand-to-hand combat is incessant. Director Bong Joon Ho ensures each new subsequent set piece is as thrilling as the one before.
Presumably constrained by an acceptable running time for a mass audience, Snowpiercer is short of a couple of carriages of action. I believe the forward incursion takes place over a far longer period in Lob's original source material. As a result, the forward momentum of Snowpiercer is relentless and progress is seldom checked.
But Snowpiercer suffers greatly from a diametric change in tone. The film opens as an intriguingly dark tale of lower class unrest in steampunk squalor, but morphs into a mawkish candy-coloured, saccharine-sweet satire. A journey set to depart from Blade Runner, calling at all points Brazil, Mad Max: Fury Road and The Hunger Games, before arriving at the final destination, Death Race 2000.
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