For those who’ve not heard of the film, Snowpierce is a sci-fi, action, dystopian, post-apocalyptic movie which preaches an environmental cause, class uprising, as well as the horror and cruelty of humankind. Can’t get much more precise than that.
The film has been incredibly well reviewed, receiving a mind-boggling 95% from Rotten Tomatoes critics, however in an odd turn (for an action flick), audiences were nowhere near as favourable with their reviews, scoring it at 77%.
That said, the film paints its messages in fairly broad, in your face, strokes, and reviews do like that style. And style, it has. Director Joon-ho Bong does a phenomenal job in filming the movie, with gripping action sequences and amazing set construction and decor. However the script, and a few of the actors, leave a little to be desired for some of us.
The film is based on a graphic novel, Le Transperceneige, and though neither Vince nor I read it, we will be keeping an eye out for it, to see how faithful to that script the movie was.
This was an interesting episode, as our opinions of the film varied quite a bit. Vince was far more impressed with it, willing to allow himself to be taken along for the ride (if you don’t like puns, stay away from this episode). I, however, would score the film even a little lower than 77%. This isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the film. I did. However the issues I had with it were series enough that they took me completely out of the film, and that’s something you don’t want to do as a filmmaker.
Let us know what you thought of the movie.
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Let’s see where to begin, I would also recommend that people see this movie because it is interesting. Though I also agree that it’s not like this gamechanging archetype that no other movie has done.
The acting of the movie was great, almost all the characters are well done. Especially if the girl in yellow and the evil man were robots because that would make a lot of sense to the plot. Neither of them really cared that they lost things when the movie went along. I was rather annoyed that he kept getting up so now I’m going to subscribe to the fact that he is an android of some sort.
I love the progression of train cars and how vastly different one is from the next, it makes the thought of a boring train setting much more enjoyable since the next room could have something crazy and unexpected in it.
His breakdown at the end was him finally feeling everything that had been done to get to the final stage and be shut out. It was like the straw that broke the camel’s back and from that perspective I believe it was necessary. He showed little emotion to that point just choosing to plow along ahead through the cars to hope to get that justice he was seeking. When he finally ran out of cars it was like having to admit that his dream and all the loss was for nothing.
The ending also left both me and Nyks with weird feelings. While sure we can say they can survive outside with all the little things adding up. It was a girl and a little kid they can’t propagate the species, and the rest of the train was destroyed. Plus that polar bear looked hungry. I suppose the ambiguous ending is something new to the scene, you can take it as positive if you go really deep on it about succeeding through countless struggles. Or negative because that is most likely all of humanity, least that is what we are lead to believe.
It is a well done movie that I assume is sticking to the source material, and it was worth the watch. Even to expand more should be taken from graphic novels of other cultures if this would be the results. I agree with Vince that I was thinking much darker things would be happening, instead it was more like a dark sequel to The Truman Show.