Forum Overview :: Peter Molyneux's The Movies :: Snowpiercer

[quote name="blackwater"]I saw Snowpiercer last weekend at home. It's a postapocalyptic movie... set on a train. The premise is that the world has completely frozen over due to geoengineering gone wrong. This train is apparently humanity's last refuge... the last place where it's warm enough to survive. As the movie opens, we learn that this train has been on the tracks for almost 20 years since the world froze over. The train is apparently ruled by a despotic leader who creates a rigid social hierarchy between the people who live in the "tail" and the passengers at the front. The movie mostly follows the struggles of the people in the tail. I kind of enjoyed seeing the different train cars as the movie went on. It's kind of like an evil version of Willie Wonka's chocolate factory. This movie is also filmed with fast motion-- or whatever it's called where they bump up the FPS. Anyway, some of the action scenes are REALLY fast... if you're used to watching older movies it's quite different. Overall, the cinematography is good... there's no shaky cam or pointless jump cuts like a lot of other recent movies. When the survival of humanity is dependent on the train running smoothly, it's hard to get too angry at the people running the train. The movie's solution to this is to make them all complete scenery-chewing villains. It doesn't really work... or at least, it didn't for me. The director is Korean. I think maybe the train is a metaphor for the situation with North and South Korea, where on one hand you have a horrible, depotic regime, but on the other, you have the possibility of World War III breaking out if you attack them. Or something. We could probably play this guessing game all day... The train is kind of a cool idea, but there it doesn't really make a lot of sense if you think about it too hard. Can a train really run for almost 20 years with no service (or at least, only service done while it's moving, by the people on board?) If there's really so much snow falling everywhere, isn't the track going to be buried by the time it loops around again? I mean it can get through some amount of snow, but eventually there's going to be avalanches or ice obstructions. The motivations of a lot of characters seemed bizarre to me. There's one guy who wants to get off the train... why, exactly? I guess he believes he can survive outside, but there's nothing in the movie that makes that seem plausible. The main bad guy's motivations don't make a lot of sense to me either. I guess you could say these characters were insane, but if that was the point, there should have been other signs that they were unstable. Anyway... probably worth seeing if you run into it. Not really worth seeking out. A little more subtlety would have made this a much better movie.[/quote]