Snowpiercer – Review

Radio broadcasts play out history as humanity deals with global warming and the collapse of society. A revolutionary solution will be the introduction of an agent named CW7 into the air which should cool the planet significantly and reduce gas levels. This event backfires in 2014, and by 2031 the planet’s surface has frozen over.

Now, the only society we know is on a high-speed bullet train “the Snowpiercer” which zooms through the frozen wasteland of what remains of the earth. The front is where the rich people thrive and feast. The back end is where the poor people fight for survival daily. It is war in-between. Enter Curtis Everett (Evans) and his pal Edgar (Bell) who are looking to finally make a move a few cars up. The locals look to them and their plan.

Gilliam (Hurt) gives guidance as a teacher and tail section leader, the group of men all with hopes of somehow making lives better for the entire slums. Curtis wants to take control of the engine itself and virtually seize the entire train “world.” He wants new leadership. This means revolutions however, which means violence and death. Come along for the ride in Snowpiercer, where the classes collide at the end of humanity’s history in unexpected ways.

This film has a sharp and creative script full of wild ideas and strong execution of most of them. Despite confined, grimy and cramped sets, it is often visually stunning and story wise still gets in plenty of world building even with the claustrophobia. It holds great looking conventional sets inside the train cars; however, the outside world CGI is a bit iffy at times. The dialogue allows actors to give their characters range, and most of the time the scenes keep you on your toes.

Quality is of the utmost with this film. It is a fairly wild ride that demonstrates some cool ideas and holds some decent action contained in an interesting depiction of the future. It goes to some dark places and is quite bloody. I have not read it, but it’s probably worth checking out the French graphic novel source material if you love the film, and even possibly the TV series that came later, but I didn’t see that either.