“The world is rapidly destroying itself. More at the top of the hour.”
Apocalyptic film outings of late — Pacific Rim is a useful example to start — begin with a newsreel.
Largely, these opening credit sequences are superfluous; they’re an acclimating toe-dip into a pool of alien invaders, zombie-inducing viruses or ocean-dwelling leviathans. It’s one of the things Snowpiercer appears to know best about its extended family of post-disaster blockbusting mates. It dawns modestly with a crackly WWII-esque radio signal, weaving a story about a gas used to internationally counteract climate change, which ends up freezing the world.
It’s pure prelude, all in black, displaying severance from the status quo of humanity. The future arrives, so no need to market the time just before the carnage, or even more laboriously, that the audience is living in it right now. A self-assured apocalypse shouldn’t waste much convincing people of its own foreshadowing.
It’s a snow-blanketed, DOA world with one exception: a few hundred people on a non-stop, globetrotting train called Snowpiercer. The train is divided between front and back, luxury and steerage, though with more of a concentration camp tilt to the tail than just squalor. For 17 years, the people in the back have seen nothing of the front, imprisoned shoulder to shoulder in bunks, eating gelatinous protein blocks. A deified conductor called Wilford and his “engine” are what keep the train rolling. These are director Bong Joon-ho’s blueprints, based on a French graphic novel by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette.
For characters we have Curtis (Chris Evans), the roguish, brow-heavy leader of a pending rebellion in the tail class. Edgar (Jamie Bell) is his boyish devoted sidekick. Tanya (Octavia Spencer) quickly loses her son to a security inspection from the armed guards; she’s the driven mother with a heart of gold. Gilliam (John Hurt) is the train’s memory, the old man who recalls all the failed revolts and, more mystically, how Wilford came to be.
That list is to say, when I argue Snowpiercer is the best action movie of this year (and one of the best so far, period), that it’s not touting high-minded originality so much as truly generous execution. It employs as many archetypes as the movies with which it will eventually share an American wide release this summer. (Snowpiercer has already broken box office records in South Korea, where it’s been out nearly a year.)
Rather, Snowpiercer squeezes more out of a few dozen train cars than other movies get out of jet-setting the entire world looking for miracle cures. It gets more out of a careful allowance of sunlight blinking into a window than an imploding skyscraper. And it accomplishes all of it for less than $40 million. The movies it’s compared to in this piece — Edge of Tomorrow, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Godzilla — average around $170 million in budgets.
But the actual train is a gift of writing, too, an organizing principle for an entire universe, inspiring a brilliantly linear style of cause-and-effect writing. Everyone involved, from the characters to the audience, knows where the entire movie is headed, on a track. There’s only one direction it will ever go: a kind of limitation that ushers the most out of every room. Because it’s surprisingly not claustrophobic, like a closet where you keep finding nooks and crannies and memorabilia you tried to forget about.
Curtis and his comrades in the tail of Snowpiercer make their own monuments, they write their own mythology about past revolutions. Selfishness, ruthlessness and guilt are magnified, but so is the idea that people create classes and hierarchies in a way that, even if it’s not innate, is psychological.
Everything belongs in its “particular preordained position,” as the film is fond of communicating via the wealthy idealists of the front cars. This is, mostly, a movie about what humans do, not what heroes do. And that’s a question so taxing to answer that the other critically-acclaimed action film this summer, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, decided to be a movie about apes acting like people rather than posing that challenge to the human characters themselves.
Part of what makes Snowpiercer so compelling is its unapologetic eccentricity. It’s a movie full of archetypes, but cast upon actors with the leeway to make them weird, mysterious and gross. Tilda Swinton, as Minister Mason, a sort of over-starched mouthpiece for Wilford, is working in type, but is surprisingly neurotic, sometimes like a Dolores Umbridge or a Nurse Ratched, but then descending into the brogue of a distressed Scottish cat. Better yet, the script feels no anxiety to explain why.
In this way, Chris Evans is the film’s most unrescuable slice of generality. He’s a line of railroad track, while a half dozen other characters are disruptive pennies scattered about. He’s a reluctant leader and wholly American, which is noticeable in a global, subtitle-filled outing. Wrought with rebellion guilt, he doesn’t flatline like a Taylor Kitsch or a Charlie Hunnam, but has neither the sheer chops nor the wild streak of the actors around him. Everyone on the train seems to have distant a past and a permanent present, so when the rubber finally hits the road for Curtis, it’s as though Evans is jarred into playing a different character.
Makeup and costuming are billed in the opening credits before any actor, a commitment to the flora and fauna of an iron beast and its citizens. There’s stunning crispness to almost everything aboard, even the gray-green walls of a railroad ghetto. When the fighting sparks up — and does it ever — Snowpiercer is a coordination of bodies and choreography that isn’t compensated for by sheer speed and digital mechanics. It was shot physicality in mind. The camera understands the fighting. It’s dueling and dodging, as well. It must be its own action hero to keep up with Evans, just seconds ahead of the careening machete or cleaver, a dancer in equal measure.
And in terms of idiosyncrasies, could a US/UK director even have managed Snowpiercer? In Edge of Tomorrow, Tom Cruise makes his own brand of weird by simply having a license to be on-screen associating with human beings. In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Andy Serkis makes it with his face. In Godzilla, it’s oddity is perhaps its quaintness, its unlikely commitment to something classic.
The American version of this movie wouldn’t have a name like medieval sword. It would love men and women and their gendered stations probably too much. It would love types so much it would be tempted to hate them.
There’s something to be said that totalitarian state of the train draws from North Korean imagery via a South Korean director. The imagery is undeniable, but simultaneously in touch with the natural world. Earth is ice, not ash. It plays the cruel game of appearing to look inhabitable. It’s all related to the simplicity of the disaster set-up. Bong Joon-ho presents a slate of people and ideas — stratification, survival and complacency — so familiar that the actual transposition is akin to a magic act.