Snowpiercer (2013) - Review
Originally published December 2015While Rotten Tomatoes has certainly never determined what I will and will not watch, its tomato meter has at least proven as a consistent scale for quality and dreck. That is until I watched Snowpiercer.
At the time of this review, Snowpiercer has a 95% on that scale with still a vast majority of the typical audience enjoying this movie. I had heard good things and read some reviews about Snowpiercer and intended to watch it myself eventually. Having finally done so, I regret giving it the hours of my life I cannot get back. Before I get into why, here are the bullet points.
Image: The Weinstein Company | It sure is
Pros
Interesting premise for a post-apocalyptic story
A vibrant art design with some cool color contrasts
Tilda Swinton's clearly having fun and it translates into her character and performance
The drug-addict characters
Some creative thought put into the culture built around a society that's been on an ever-moving train for the past 20 years
Cons
Not enough thought put into the culture of a nonstop train society
Characters and story are boring
Unforgivable amount of plot holes and/or flubs
Dumb plot twists are dumb
Action scenes are bland and poorly shot
Melodramatic
"You have to lead now"
Overt symbolism that does not matter
So loooong
Plot & Thoughts
This entire review could be just about how many and how dumb the plot holes are, including the stupid plot twists that take place—there are plenty of other reviews on IMDB that do so with great fervor. It's astonishing how often I felt the need to blurt out a question I had while I was watching. These questions were often in regard to something happening that made no logical sense to me. At one point while I was watching, I asked myself, "If it weren't for the fact that I had so many questions that were going unanswered, would I still dislike the movie so much?"
Image: The Weinstein Company
The short answer: yes.
I won't go into detail about the plot holes, numerous and abhorrent as they are, though it's impossible to ignore them entirely. There are a number of other flaws with this film that prevent it from being anything more than an artist's hackneyed attempt at something done a thousand times before. It's the laziness of the writing and storytelling that really bothers me about Snowpiercer.
There's no real plot, other than the lower class is revolting, they want to get to the front of the train to get their just desserts, and they want to find their children who had been stolen by the rich for unknown reasons. Revolt occurs, and chaos ensues. Sounds familiar in film, right? Except it's tough to make a full-length feature film about a revolt on a train. The space is limited, as are the resources, and a reason for the revolt to last very long. Then, the film must be about something more, right? It has to be about how the train works, how the culture of the people aboard functions, and how it all relates to our own society and its disparities, right? Too bad, we're never given enough details about this world for it to make much sense, let alone apply it to our own.
The world and everyone in it is a bland husk with no depth or, in Chris Evans' case, force-stuffed with depth that doesn't work. While everyone else is a one-note character, Captain America's fortunate enough to come equipped with a back story, force-fed to us through exposition in the last 20 minutes of the film and really changes nothing about his character other than giving us more info about him than anyone else in the movie. It just gives him some last-minute justification to do something dumb and symbolic. The only somewhat interesting characters come from Tilda Swinton's comical and eccentric performance and those of Ah-sung Ko and Kang-ho Song who play the unpredictable drug-addict family. There's really not much else to latch onto.
Image: The Weinstein Company | Why? Why late-story exposition?
We're supposed to root for the underdog lower class just because poor people good and rich people bad! Everything is presented in such a "how dare the rich be so cruel" manner, it seems like the film expects its audience to be stupid and not bother to ask any questions. This would be less of an issue if it weren't also trying to be an intelligent film that told some deeper version of Hunger Games's story. I didn't care much for that movie either, but it at least had fewer plot holes and a (barely) more logical scenario that didn't exacerbate its premise too much further. Speaking of the premise...
Image: The Weinstein Company
On paper, it sounds like a cool (pun-intended) idea. The world ended in Ragnarok fashion with a seemingly eternal winter that killed off everything. All of society and the various wildlife of the planet have gone "extinct" except for the lucky few who managed to make it on a Noah's Ark magic train that never stops running on the infinite track. This magic train travels around the world every year and has done so for almost 2 decades. In those two decades, people have formed a system and society within the train like a microscopic world of its own.
Already, the premise is both dumb and interesting. On one hand, curiosity is conjured up by the thought of what it would be like on a perpetually moving train with the last hope for humanity and any other wildlife aboard. On the other hand, the questions about the feasibility of this whole idea also fester. I found that, even if you accept the fact that this wholly unrealistic idea is possible for the sake of the film, Snowpiercer attempts to become a more complex, dramatic, and detailed universe than this initial idea allows. Yet, it doesn't put the effort necessary to fill the hole it dug for itself. As a result, more questions are added to the list of things that don't make sense and go unanswered.
Image: The Weinstein Company | Serious?
As I mentioned, this would not be a problem if Snowpiercer did not attempt to be an intelligent film. You can accept this type of absurdity and nonsense from a Rambo movie, or anything else that tries to just be dumb fun from the get-go. Snowpiercer, however, attempts to be an intense, character drama with so much heavy-handed symbolism and theming that it is almost begging its audience to ask questions, but it's not willing to provide more than one-word answers.
The filmmakers clearly wanted to make a movie about disparity among classes and how the sociopathic upper class justified their position, but they wanted to do so with an anime premise that didn't make sense. If they had really thought about it, they would have realized that confining different classes to the train and then creating and maintaining the disparity between classes is just asking for trouble. You're all on the same boat/train! What's the point in creating a disparity that will only breed animosity? They try explaining this in one of the plot twists, but it's a very inefficient and, just plain, dumb method of controlling things that could easily be rectified with a simpler, passive solution, like a lottery.
Image: The Weinstein Company | I WIN! I CANNOT DIE!
The fact is, Snowpiercer's writing is lazy. Everything that happens in the movie, happens for the sake of convenience, which probably explains why there are so many plot holes. Here are some examples. There's a lower class that is constantly put down by an upper class because of course there is. The lower class eats crappy protein bars while the rich eat regular food because of course they do. What's the point of having a poor class? They say at some point how a low class is necessary because of the steady stream of children available from the poor, but then, what of the rich? Are they sterile and thus need children from the poor class? Is there any point to that particular detail other than to make the correlation to the real world in how people in the lower classes are multiplying more because of their lack of resources and sexual education? As soon as the film tries to answer one question, it creates five more.
Here's another example: the protein bars the poor are forced to eat. We the audience wonder what they're made of. We are given the answer in a dramatic scene with Captain America witnessing the horror of tons of cockroaches being ground up in the processing machine. Yet we are given no further insight into how so many are harvested and have been harvested on a regular basis aboard a moving train for 20 years, why they would feed them cockroaches when there are other animals aboard that would be a renewable resource, etc. This detail serves little purpose other than a method of making the rich seem more villainous and cruel for no logical reason.
TL;DR (Conclusion)
Snowpiercer feels like the product of an amateur fiction writer who thought he was so clever with his themes and symbolism, but completely forgot or was too lazy to bother actually writing a coherent story, interesting characters, or creating a world that made sense. Without all the other elements that actually make up a good movie, the artistic qualities of the direction and writing only draw attention to the absence of those elements. The movie's messages are clear, but its methods of delivery fall apart almost immediately, making the film a bigger waste of time than a dumb movie that didn't try to be anything other than entertaining.