Summer of Netflix Day 32: Snowpiercer

Joel: Ok, so that ended up being a pretty incredible movie. Very smart, slick and incredibly fast paced. In all honesty, I didn’t think the idea of the train was really going to work. Yeah the claustrophobic feeling of a train car would be a great setting for one action scene. But an entire movie? With multiple action beats? I don’t mind admitting I had doubts about that working. Well, not only does it work fantastically, one of the best aesthetic aspects of the movie is the setup of the train. Each train car can only be so wide, and the movie never forgets that. It stays tight, and there’s never a scene with an impossibly wide car that’s hand waved away because it’s one of the “nice cars.” The crowded feeling continues all the way up to the engine. There’s some pretty clear influences from the work of Terry Gilliam (down to the naming of one of the main characters) and if you enjoy any of his sci-fi work, this is a pretty great movie to check out.

Chris: It's dystopian, post-apocalyptic, horizontal Game of Death with guns.

I’m not saying that as a bad thing, it’s just the best way to describe Snowpiercer in a few lines. Of course, the plot alone is surprisingly deep for a movie that exclusively takes place on a train. A lot of themes are at play here, humanity’s destruction of the environment, even when they’re trying to save it, trickle down economics and how the higher classes (or least the people in charge) keep the lower class from progressing and only promote a select number of them to keep balance. The twist at the end that this renewable energy powering the engine failed and now relied on manual power (or small children doing the work) was an interesting one, kind of saying that we’re our own renewable energy source, in a way. The true irony of a class system that all lives on a horizontal plane (like the train or...oh, I don’t know, the earth’s surface) is that once something destroys that horizontal plain, everyone on-board is screwed regardless of class.

Your Viewing Homework for Tomorrow: The Boxtrolls