"Snowpiercer:" Summer's best movie about your war with the 1%

Saw it last night. Very engaging stuff -- surprisingly unflinching politics wrapped up in summer-y action


Bong-joon Ho's Snowpiecer isn't simply a movie, it's a manifesto. It's a manual for revolution, both political and cinematic. It is a masterpiece that fulfills every promise science fiction, telling an exciting, action-packed story about our world today couched in the world of tomorrow.

In the near future mankind's attempts to battle global warming go terribly wrong; the scientific breakthrough meant to stabilize global temperatures freezes the planet in an instant. Only a few survive: those who were rich enough to buy tickets on Snowpiercer and those sad souls who mobbed the platform in the last moments, giving up all they had for a cramped berth in steerage. Snowpiercer is a futuristic train that never needs to stop. Its course winds around the world, and its perpetual motion engine keeps it going. Snowpiercer, the dream of industrialist Wilford (Ed Harris) is a closed ecosystem, creating all its own food and water and goods. It's perfectly calibrated... except for the wretches in back.

Life at the back of the train is a nightmare. Snowpiercer has been traveling for 17 years, long enough for an entire generation to come up in the dark, cramped confines of the cattle cars. Up front the rich frolic and destroy their brains with drugs (the better to forget they're the final dregs of humanity, trapped on a snowball) while in the rear people fight to survive, living on a diet of slimy protein bars, having their children mysteriously called forward to serve Wilford and never return. There have been uprisings in the past, but all have failed. Now Curtis (Chris Evans) is ready to try again. He's been getting mysterious messages from someone in the front of the train, and he's convinced that the guards who subjugate the Tail Enders are holding guns that fired their last bullets years ago. He leads a diverse band of freedom fighters forward, car by car, intending to take the engine.

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Each of these battles also represent steps in political liberation. Snowpiercer plays, for much of its running time, as an unapologetic cry for rebellion against the plutocrats that control our system. The world inside the train isn't much different from our own (and this will be a source of agita for nitpickers, who won't be able to deal with the allegoric nature of Snowpiercer and will fret about just where all those cows are being kept), and the inequality on display mirrors our own world. It's important to note that Snowpiercer the train traverses the Earth, and that Curtis' crew is deliberately multi-ethnic; Bong is speaking about the globe here, not just the plight of the disappearing middle class in America. This is a movie about the inequality that plagues humanity, and everybody reading this has to understand they're living towards the front of the train.

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http://badassdigest.com/2014/06/29/snowpiercer-movie-review-an-incendiary-masterpiece