SNOWPIERCER

We popped into the video rental store last weekend and treated ourselves to a few "keep-for-5-nighters", some old, some newer releases. Snowpiercer is going to be the one that'll remain in my memory longest. The movie was among a handful mentioned as potentially interesting in an August post of mine. So far, Snowpiercer is the only film from that list we've managed to see.
As mentioned in my earlier post, the nutshell Wiki synopsis:

In 2014, an experiment to counteract global warming causes an ice age that kills nearly all life on Earth. The only survivors are the inhabitants of the Snowpiercer, a massive train, powered by a perpetual-motion engine, that travels on a globe-spanning track. A class system is installed, with the elites inhabiting the front of the train and poor inhabiting the tail. In 2031, the tail inhabitants prepare for the latest in a series of rebellions....

From that brief outline of the plot it's not hard to guess there will be a strong theme of "them and us" - the haves and have nots, the eternal struggle, running through this film. Have you ever travelled on a plane in that part now known as "coach", and peered longingly from your cramped seat, legs numb, plastic dinner tray of plastic food before you, into "Business" or "First Class" - through the curtain that stewards will occasionally leave slightly open? That's the feeling, but multiplied by millions, the people who live in the tail end of the Snowpiercer train experience.

The heart of the Snowpiercer train is "the eternal engine" - perpetual motion engine created by industrialist, Wilford who has come to be revered almost akin to a god aboard this long, snake-like vehicle. At the train's tail-end live the "lowest" class of humans, crowded together in near darkness, filthy, no access to soap and water, fed only nasty gelatinous bars known as "protein bars" (you don't want to know what goes into them - it's not the same ingredient as Soylent Green by the way) . We learn, in the course of the movie, of even greater horrors these people had to face, in order to survive, during earlier years on the train. As the film begins the train has been circling the Earth for some 17 years, the year is 2031. It takes exactly one year to make the round trip of the globe. New Year is "celebrated" each time a certain location, the Yekaterina Bridge, is reached.

Revolution is in the air - again. It won't be the first, but could well be the last. This is the main strand of the movie's story. A reluctant leader, Curtis, and his friend are determined that a new effort be made for invasion of the forward carriages where the "elite" enjoy obscene luxury, then right on to the very head and heart of the train, in order to take over the entire working system. Easy in theory but difficult, and at times even darkly funny, in practice.

I'll say no more about actual plot detail, so as not to spoil it for any who might still wish to see the film on DVD, Netflix or whatever. For any who'd like a little more detail without full spoilers, there's a very good review with illustrations at a blog called If You Want the Gravy.

I will, though, mention a few of things (among too many) that new viewers might like to watch for.

As the film has a Korean director, Bong Joon-ho, and is loosely adapted from a French graphic novel, with American production and distribution companies involved, there are bound to be reflections of multi-cultural sensibilities. Stereotypes and a few snide, occasionally funny, "digs" at certain stereotypical myths are noticeable. For instance, myth of the low quality of British dental work was one I picked up on, being British by birth myself. Said "dig" came via one of the film's most memorable characters, "Minister Mason" played by an almost unrecognisable Tilda Swinton, speaking with a thick Yorkshire/Lancashire border accent, mistaken by one American reviewer as Scottish - Tsk!! Tilda's "Mason" made me think of Ayn Rand, others have likened her to Margaret Thatcher, but think of more recent conservative females who seemed at times to be batshit crazy, "out there where the buses don't run", and you've got "Mason".

As the revolutionaries struggle to progress ever further towards the snakey-train's head, things become more and more bizarre to their eyes (and, indeed, to ours). They move through carriages which contain a whole eco-system in miniature. We then see another of those easily recognisable (to UK or US viewers) "digs", this time at the fascism, propaganda and religiosity barely hidden in some American educational establishments these days, as the rebels crash through a well-heeled version of a private school.

Something about two-thirds of the way through the movie struck me as possibly significant in a different way: a close-up shot hovering for several seconds on Curtis, the rebel leader's hand, bloody, pierced right through by a spear. "Jesus reference?" I thought. Then - "Probably not." But later I came across an article at KINJA, by novelist Michael M. Hughes, ​How an Obscure 2nd Century Christian Heresy Influenced Snowpiercer. Snip:

"Snowpiercer is shaping up to be the sleeper success of 2014. But no one has yet commented on one of the film's most unusual subtexts — its direct allusions to Gnosticism, the ancient Christian belief system that was damned by the Roman Church as heretical and virtually extinguished by the 5th century.....................
A core tenet of Gnosticism is that our world, or the physical universe, is the creation of a false god, or demiurge, who pretends to be a benevolent creator but is in fact a malevolent impostor intent on keeping humans imprisoned in an artificial world of illusion and suffering. The only means of escape is gnosis (Greek for knowledge) —rising up from base materialism to reject the demiurge and break through into the higher world of the spirit....................

Wilford, the creator of the eponymous Snowpiercer in Bong Joon-ho's visionary science fiction epic, has fabricated our world in microcosm. It's an enormous, interconnected ecosystem that — because of its function as an ark for the all that remains of humanity —truly is their only world (young Timmy calls it "the whole wide train"). Snowpiercer flips the Gnostic model of the cosmos sideways, however, and instead of moving vertically from the lower material world to the higher, more exalted spiritual realm, the tail-enders' quest takes them horizontally from the Dickensian hell of the caboose to the rarified heaven of the eternal engine. ............

Because the Gnostic earth is a prison, the demiurge is its insane, sadistic warden. Wilford (played by Ed Harris) openly admits his madness: "I believe it's easier for someone to survive on this train if they have some level of insanity," he tells Curtis. "We need to maintain a proper balance of anxiety and fear, chaos and horror."

From what I've written so far, a passing reader might get the impression that Snowpiercer is a straight-up politically "lefty revolutionary" tale. It isn't quite as clear-cut as that. As the movie ends (and I'll not give away the ending, which is ambiguous anyway) one is left with the thought, "what was the alternative - was it better to be alive, even in those circumstances, or would it be better to be dead? What would have happened if Curtis had......" 'Bye to the old boss, here's your new boss - same ol' , same ol'?

Is there but one perpetual system for humans on Earth, whoever happens to be in the driver's seat?

Snowpiercer is a thought-provoking movie, probably not one for viewers who like stories with no plot-holes, or for those who cannot countenance a few illogical factors. The best way to approach this film is as a fable for the 21st century, an allegory, a mirror - an ultra-quirky Hall of Mirrors mirror.