Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2013)

[jbeall]

Really fascinating piece on how Bong's techniques produce claustrophobia in the second half of Snowpiercer.

[Michael Kerpan]

Really fascinating piece on how Bong's techniques produce claustrophobia in the second half of Snowpiercer.

Interesting -- but too bad the writer uses Bong's personal name (Joon-ho) repeatedly throughout t the piece.

[zedz]

This film has vastly improved in my estimation upon a second viewing. I plan to write more later, but even the stuff that doesn't work the first time around becomes merely endearingly bizarre the second time around, which improves the overall experience significantly. One quick observation: I don't know if enough has been made about how great Chris Evans is in this film. Really a revelatory performance.

Yes, indeed. I actually uncharacteristically saw it twice within a few days (theatrical screening, then somebody who missed it wanted to watch the BluRay), and the thing is much more tightly constructed than I initially suspected. I think it's probably still Bong's weakest feature, but it does so much so well that it's churlish to expect more. Sure, the fundamental concept is goofily unlikely, but at least the characters and plot (and political allegory) follow a logical development within those initial terms. And I have to admire the film for pursuing its chosen allegory to the bitter end rather than copping out with

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a happy ending, in which the Train / Society would be much improved if only the existing despot were replaced with a more sympathetic one. The resolution to societal inequality and exploitation proposed by this film is frankly anarchist. The film repeatedly asserts (and implicitly confirms) the ruling class's mantra that the alternative to rigid stratification and exploitation is 'freeze and die' - for instance, we're given no indication that there's any alternative to sticking a little kid in a hole if you want the engine to keep running - and so the only way to eliminate injustice is to obliterate society. In this world, you can't have it both ways, and you probably can't have survival with a clear conscience either: humankind's two survivors are two people with absolutely no skills for survival outside the now defunct Train / Society.

[colinr0380]

Major spoilers:

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This has to be the best 'train as a metaphor for life' film since The Darjeeling Limited, although rather than the journey of life in Darjeeling, here it is more about societal stratifications that are both extremely inequal and yet ultimately entirely meaningless. The message I took away from the film was that the only option is simply not to engage at all: even if not engaging means almost certain death in itself at least it is not a death that keeps the cogs of the machine oiled with blood.

I loved all of the extremely wild performances here and this is a film that calls out for that kind of Terry Gilliam-style extreme of performance (I am sure that it is no coincidence that one of the main characters is actually called Gilliam!). Tilda Swinton's character was great (even if I would have killed her character a couple of scenes before they actually get around to doing that!), and I'm sure that she must have done some research into that kind of management seminar, chummy but steely-eyed kind of lecturer/appraiser that delights in putting those in their control in their place. Even the great moment of trying and failing to get the conference call to work struck a chord for me! (And perhaps would for anyone ever stuck watching overconfident lecturers getting their pomposity punctured by overhead projector failures, bad internet connections, and suchlike!)

Her character also marries well with the schoolteacher singing almost North Korean-style paens to the ‘glory of the train’ with her precocious and entitled children with eyes half-closed in shuddering, almost orgasmic ecstasy! Or alternatively it is as if the schoolteacher had just stepped out of the latest Atlas Shrugged adaptation!

I liked the sense that I noticed as many wry nods to societal situations as film references here. Of course the protein blocks and stealing children away raise ideas of Soylent Green long before Curtis's final horrific story of his past near the end of the film (which I really liked got immediately countered by Namgoong’s hopeful idea of a new future – the krono truly opening a gateway to a new world, but not in the drug fuelled abandonment sense at first assumed), but the protein blocks also reminded me of the whole horsemeat scandal in the UK a few years back that itself was folded into a rather problematic debate (and terribly smug, missing the point about the breach of confidence surrounding food labelling to allow a consumer to make an informed choice) about why working class people subsist on a diet of ready meals rather than buying ingredients to make fresh meals, and why we shouldn’t all just be vegeterians, and why be so upset about not knowing what meat you are eating anyway? After all it was just horse? Don't the French eat horse as a delicacy anyway?

And I particularly loved the hilarious allusion to the Olympic torch runners handing the flame from one significant character to another! No unknowns or unworthies allowed to carry the flame! Only the righteous running for a nominated cause!

And the seeming allusion to the armistice during World War I as in the middle of a bloody axe battle everything stops for thirty seconds for the train to celebrate the new year before everyone goes right back to the business of hacking each other apart! I like the way that the film understands the inherent blackly comic horror of top-down imposed faux-societal bonding moments gone sour!

I also liked the seemingly planned attempt at getting the lower classes fighting amongst each other by labelling them all as worthless freeloaders (it does not seem that any of the people in the tail section were ever given any meaningful tasks to do on the train, even from a slave labour point of view), and getting them to disdain and even ostracise each other over aspects such as the krono drug use. And of course the eventual revelation of the amputations being as much symbolic of previous struggles – the wise, crippled elders of the class – as they were necessary, leading to a kind of wish to have the same kind of amputations done to become part of the club (By the way there does seem with this film and Sunshine to be a growing trend of Chris Evans getting a body part stuck in machinery during the climaxes of sci-fi films. I’ll be curious to see if this happens again when he is next in a sci-fi film!) The internalisation of your place in the system is as devastatingly helpless here as it was in Salo, and even shows that you don't even need to waste bullets until absolutely necessary!

I also like the Victorian-style idea of upper classes preying on the lower ones, plucking children out of the gutter to press them into service as just more technological chimney sweeps (but it also reminds me of the modern Billy Elliot-trend of plucking just one kid out of the mass for educational salvation, that in some ways problematically justifies the death of an 'old fashioned' working class culture in its wake), and also the way that our hero Curtis is in that kind of mould of a single-minded aspirational achiever trying to work his way up to the top by fair means or foul. These are both obvious ideas but they always bear repeating and especially so when they get portrayed in such an interesting way.

I think that the linear nature of moving through the train works too, in providing its own kind of fatalism to the story. There is no real chance for a divergent path, only back or forward with each leading to a new status quo. You either participate or not, and often the choice of even that has already been made for you long in advance by upper management (this is also where comparisons to the Matrix, and especially the conversation between Neo and The Architect at the end of Reloaded bears comparison to this film).

I liked that the fight scenes were both abstract and brutal at the same time. Time is spent on them but the spectacle of the action is often not the only point. For example the opening rebellion showing the large group from the tail section working together (they actually reminded me of the sailors in Das Boot, although that might have been the cramped locations as much as the focused action!), then the sort of Spartacus-style bloody face-off that transforms into the night vision cameraed callous picking off of the vulnerable by the brutal forces of oppression, and so on. One of the aspects I particularly liked was that the film took a lot of care to keep the girl Yona ‘pure’ by protecting and even actually preventing her from committing any acts of violence when she tries to, as if to suggest that if she actually consciously hurt or killed someone that would truly be a moment of no turning back for humanity.

Anyway it is a great film, although I don’t really feel much sense of optimism from the climax (though I like that we get the title of Snowpiercer literalised with the moon landing-style boots crunching into the untouched snow!), more a sense of at least we’ve escaped the corrupt old system going around in circles and eating its own tail. I understand that for many viewers the whole sci-fi premise of the frozen world and the giant train constantly travelling is all a bit silly but it is the metaphor that counts here above anything else. I also never thought that I would see a modern film that seemed to end up taking inspiration from The Cassandra Crossing for its climax!

[matrixschmatrix]

Might want actually to spoiler tag your post. Anyway:

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The poor in the rear do actually serve some really vital labor functions, namely the provision of children to serve as replacements for dead parts in the machinery, and to kill such of the upper classes as they reach during their periodic revolts. Apart from Ed Harris, the teacher, and the soldiers, that seems to be the majority of the really vital work that anyone does.

[colinr0380]

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Yes, but that’s not really a ‘human’ labour function (even on a coercive and abusive slavery level) but a labour function on the level of cows in a cattle truck or factory hens. Or the Morlocks preying on the Elois in The Time Machine. Even the few people plucked from the mass for their exploitable talents (short term goals like needing someone who used to be a composer – exploitable pre-disaster abilities which will inevitably disappear from the tail section group over time), are more like prize pigs than even slaves.

Although perhaps that is a good metaphor for a society that might abhor the notion of slavery but extolls the sense of knowing your place, not even recognising that human beings need even a basic role to fulfil and exist within rather than just animinalistically breeding, and finding as much value in the destruction of the human being as in any particular function they might otherwise provide. Or rather their destruction is the function they fulfil, which is why I was (pleasantly!) surprised that the film didn't go more into Soylent Green territory!

[Michael Kerpan]

I highly recommend that people take a look at the source comic -- then one can see that Bong and his team started with something that had almost none of the elements that actually made the film so imprressive.

[jazzo]

I did, and found the comic unreadable.

But the film, I was fairly entranced by. There's a sly, (early) Gilliam-esque sense of humour about the whole thing that was not present in the comic, and I just felt like I was watching something by someone with an actual voice as a filmmaker.

[Michael Kerpan]

I did, and found the comic unreadable.

Yep. The story was not only implausible (vis a vis external reality) but had no real internal coherence either -- and I thought the first volume was visually ugly (and cluttered looking). It is hard to see how Bong et al. could generate such a strong movie out of such a paltry source.

[colinr0380]

However the graphic novel obviously did what any piece of art should do: enthralled and inspired others to create their own art in response. Luckily it spoke to the person in a position to create a film out of it and the French illustrators in the documentary on the US Blu-ray "Transperceniege: From The Blank Page to the Black Screen" seem appropriately shocked and surprised that it was remembered at all, let alone in Korea (and praise the pirates who translated it before its official release!), and glad that the film also gave the original story a new lease of life!

Since we haven't linked directly to it in this thread yet, here's that brief but spoiler-heavy Every Frame A Painting video about impossible character choices and moral dilemmas expressed through the direction of travel in the film: Snowpiercer - Left or Right:

here's that brief but spoiler-heavy Every Frame A Painting video about impossible character choices and moral dilemmas expressed through the direction of travel in the film: Snowpiercer - Left or Right

The only thing that I would add to that video now that it has made me aware of that subject is why is going left (in everything from A Goofy Movie to Pulp Fiction shown in that video) a kind of regressive step or something that deviates from or complicates the hero's journey, while screen right is the correct narrative way to go? Is it perhaps as simple as that being the way books are read in Western culture, just transferred to the screen? As the video says, Snowpiercer takes that concept to an extreme so as to give a clear direction for our hero to keep pushing towards fulfilling his goals, but in doing so he is in danger of losing his humanity, and on being able to get no further the 'regressive' step actually becomes the heroic one.

On the idea of adapting the source material, I do think it is interesting that in 'crazy and impractical train metaphors being turned into enormous shaggy dog parable stories' terms, that Snowpiercer somehow manages to knock all three of the Atlas Shrugged films off the rails and even works as an amusing and necessary corrective to them!

[canislupis]

The resolution to societal inequality and exploitation proposed by this film is frankly anarchist.

Nihilist. Anarchist would be recreating society from the back of the train up.

[colinr0380]

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Agreed canislupis! It is interesting that the anarchical resolution is sort of the solution being proposed and reinforced all the way through the film until that itself is (inevitably) revealed as another system of status quo, just with the figureheads replaced for a new set of selected (either self selected or groomed for greatness by others wanting a new leader) representatives who 'this time will get things right!' on behalf of the lumpen proleteriat. The nihilistic solution is a quite literal left turn and is the only one that proffers, not really any workable alternative, but at least closure to the current cycle of exploitation.

By the way, I think there is an interesting piece to be written on the use of doubling, or complimentary, characters in this film, sometimes in opposite camps but even in their opposition working to the same ends of status quo. Not just the obvious 'shocking twist' one presented at the end, or even the contrast between the Tilda Swinton and Alison Pill schoolmarms trying to indoctrinate their unruly children, but something like the way that even Swinton's thugs have their parallels in Jamie Bell and Octavia Spencer's characters, or the way that Jamie Bell's idealism for the Chris Evans character is kind of replicated both in Ed Harris's offer and Kang-ho Song's offering of a second chance of salvation.

It is as if the ends of the train are extreme mirrors of each other, with the middle being the lumpen, faceless mass instead!

[zedz]

I agree that the ultimate resolution offered in the film is nihilist (but, like Colin, I can't really consider that a 'solution', and I don't think the film does either), but I don't agree that a 'replacing Ed Harris with somebody else' scenario, or establishing some alternative 'back-first' hierarchy would be anarchist at all.

[domino harvey]

I watched this for the Road Movies project but don't think it ended up being one, so I'll just share some brief thoughts here: I thought this was a terrific work of sci-fi, with a ridiculous concept executed as best as it could be and the resultant outcome a bitter pill indeed.

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My take on the film's message wasn't so much a decrying of "the system" in favor of anarchism as showing that anarchism results in nothing you'd want (ie everyone dead and those left standing unable to fend for themselves). Sure, Ed Harris' methodology was problematic and exploited some people over others, but is that worse than everyone just being dead?

The film called to mind the book Nation of Rebels (retitled the Rebel Sell outside of the US), which I read in college and changed my life and perspective, which argued from a liberal standpoint that capitalism and rules aren't a bad thing at all, and those who think their identity or persona exists or runs "counter" to the dominant culture are still acting as part of it regardless (I couldn't possibly recommend a book more highly if you're interested, FYI). I don't think the film pretends to have answers, it merely wants to provoke questions of class and prod our prexistent beliefs, and unlike some other recent big budget fare that pretends to be smarter or deeper than it actually is (the Dark Knight comes to mind), I found the moral dilemmas here are effective and evocative. And it's pretty entertaining too, which helps!

[colinr0380]

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I really liked Ed Harris's performance in that climactic scene and wondered if his character finally sitting down to have dinner, only vaguely curious about the outcome of the situation having laid out the mysteries of this universe to the wide-eyed and youthful hero, was an amusing allusion to the final scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey!