snowpiercer

 

Snowpiercer:  A cooling agent is released into the atmosphere causing the world as we know it to freeze to the point of inhabitability. The sole survivors live on a train, the wealthy in the front the not so lucky in the squalid shantytowns of the rear. The conditions on either side are economically lopsided, the poor literally inheriting and consuming the waste of the rich. The socioeconomic situation isn’t much of a secret; in fact it’s pretty much shouted into a megaphone much like the film’s fiscal and societal disparity metaphors. The train’s unending loop and overall lack of real progressive also serves as a blunt symbol for a need to derail the system or be damned to continue on the same track. The conflict concerns a violent uprising, the attempt to turn the tables and unbalance what’s left of humanity by a group of “shoes.” Part of what I love about Bong Joon-Ho’s movies is his inability or lack of desire to sustain any hint of consistent tone. You get the sense that anything can and will happen in the midst of what appears to be worn action tropes. He’s more about the small details, the facial reactions and gestures that do such a better job of speaking to the passenger’s past lives. But he’s also in love with flat out odd behavior, peppered into the narrative to keep things lively. Yes, a guy can slip on a salmon corpse whilst fighting masked men with hatchets. Yes, Tilda Swinton will take her top teeth out randomly to deliver an inconsequential line. Yes, Song Kang-ho will huff and bump industrial waste called Kronol with his daughter but only until they use it for a far nobler purpose in the finale. Oh, and yes, a teacher will break out into song with her students before retrieving a machine gun from a cart full of hardboiled eggs. Joon-Ho’s film tumbles recklessly forward from freight car to freight car, set piece to set piece, and so on and so forth. But while much of it is proudly pure mayhem, there is a distinct emphasis in rooting the action in human internal conflict. The Host was about a family dealing with catastrophe and tragedy, the same can be argued about Mother, while Memories of Murder concerned two detectives obsessive quest to find a killer (I think Fincher took notes). The central concerns are very human, the plot and action are proficiently decentralized. With Snowpierecer, Joon-ho inherited his biggest plot and character juggling act of his career, along with the job of catering to a new and very foreign market, as well as pleasing the Weinstein’s, and yet he’s still managed to pull it all off despite some dragging exposition in the final act. Even that unfortunate grind is enlivened with some nifty visual cues, including a nice nod to Modern Times. It’s worth more than a thousand Transformers.