Endless Journey

It’s really not difficult to understand why movies that deal with abysmal social and economic inequalities take place in a dystopian future and are surrounded by fantasy. Would a billion dollar industry as happily question its own if this wasn't the case? And who would pay to see what is easily and increasingly visible in our own backyard?

Snowpiercer is a movie that joins a growing number of sci-fi films that address the power and privilege of the extremely wealthy at the expense of the many lost in a day-to-day struggle for survival within their grim and violent lives. It is more Elysium, Brazil or Soylent Green in its darkness and graphic violence than The Hunger Games, but the story is the same: the “revolutionary” born of despair and deprivation, in this case Curtis, surprisingly well played by an unrecognizable Chris Evans (none other than he who played Captain America) and his quest for social justice. In most cases, the anti-hero is overpowered by the inhumane system, unless it is a PG13 movie in which case the heroine succeeds, but still at an enormous cost.

Chris Evans, Luke Pasqualino, Ah-sung Ko in Snowpiercer

They may be science fiction, but these are cautionary tales for those willing to listen. Snowpiercer takes it one step further because it adds the environmental warning to that of social injustice. In our despair to address global warming, the film tells us, humans have engineered a planetary catastrophe that creates a second ice age and the only human survivors that aren't frozen to death are trapped on a train that has also been engineered to never stop moving.

The fact that this implausible story grasps our attention and creates an enormous amount of breath-holding tension is due to the very skilled directing of Bong Joon-ho. This is the South Korean director’s first English language film, but he is known to American audiences for two of his eleven films, The Host and Mother. A light director he is not.

The movie is based on a French graphic novel called Le Transperceneige. The human survivors on the train are divided according to class, with the very poor living in nightmarish squalor and violence in the back of the train and, many, many carriages away, in the front live the privileged few in all their wealthy excess.

The amazing set design is part of what glues us to the screen, but only because we are also held there by the actors in this film. Chris Evans, we've already mentioned, holds his own as he purposefully leads the charge to take the engine room, carriage by bloody carriage. He is joined by a remarkable Tilda Swinton, the spokesperson for the very wealthy, who to the teeth and accent reminds us of another voice of the rich, Dame Margaret Thatcher.  Interesting to note that in Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium the “keeper of the rich” is also a woman, Delacourt, played by Jodie Foster. Evans and Swinton are joined by John Hurt, Jamie Bell, Ed Harris, Go Ah-sung, Kang-ho Sung, Octavia Spencer, all noteworthy actors who take us for the nightmarish ride on this ghastly train.

Tilda Swinton - Jodie Foster

I sometimes find it hard to recommend such a movie as this because it is not a pleasant film to watch, in this case also because of the violence, but, as always, more so because we are able to recognize that we are seeing a thinly veiled representation, masked in science fiction, of a very real and growing global divide between the very wealthy and the despairing poor. This movie is not easy to walk away from untouched. Neither was Terry Gillliam’s Brazil in 1985, Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green back in 1973, or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis way back in 1927. Are we forever trapped in this never ending tale of woe?

 

Brazil - Metropolis