The concept of the apocalypse and especially its aftermath
never ceases to fascinate science fiction writers and filmmakers. Whether it comes with a bang or a whimper,
the end of the world makes for exciting cinema, but the day after doomsday
provides the most promising subject for literature and film.
Writers and directors employ a whole cornucopia of causes for
the destruction of civilization; in our time such events as machines running
amok, plagues, and catastrophic climate change replace that old favorite,
global thermonuclear war. An environmental incident, outlined on the screen,
creates the situation in “Snowpiercer”– a substance
released into the atmosphere generates a sudden immense drop in temperature all
over the world, killing most of the population and returning the Earth to a new
ice age.
A back story appearing late in the picture explains that one
brilliant inventor, a railroad magnate named Wilford
(Ed Harris) foresaw the crisis and constructed tracks and an enormous train
that circled the globe, providing refuge for survivors. Despite the utter
implausibility of the premise, the movie follows the long tradition of dystopian
science fiction, dealing with the world established inside that train.
“Snowpiercer” opens that subject
inside the carriages at the end of the train, dark, filthy, claustrophobic
traveling hovels rather like the barracks of concentration camps, a resemblance
emphasized by the presence of armed guards who brutalize the inhabitants and by
a stern officer named Mason (Tilda Swinton), who
speaks with a German accent. She spells
out the social structure of the train — first class passengers up front, economy
class in the middle, and the group she calls freeloaders in something like
steerage. The rigid class system is the brainchild of Wilford,
who desires a world where people know their place and remain in it, because,
somewhat tautologically, that’s the way it should be.
One of the oppressed, Curtis (Chris
Evans), leads a revolution, overpowering a contingent of guards, releasing a
man who can open the many locks that separate the cars, and commanding his
people in a series of bloody battles with the troops in Wilford’s
private army. As the group progresses
through the train, wreaking destruction, they encounter the levels of social
class constructed in conformity with Wilford’s
vision, moving through ascending strata of luxury and even decadence in their
violent journey. In one of the most important moments they enter a schoolroom
where the children accompany a filmed biography of Wilford’s
life with a hymn of praise and creepy stylized salutes.
When after a good deal of travail and several shootouts with
a number of thugs, one of whom appears virtually immortal, Curtis finally meets
Wilford, he learns some disturbing truths about the
man, his vision, and his own place in the scheme of things. Wilford
lectures him pleasantly on the meaning of the train as a kind of allegory and
the reasons for some of the horrible history that Curtis has participated in
and some of the inhuman actions he has witnessed. The philosophy Wilford espouses resembles the sort of social Darwinism,
leavened with doses of Hobbes and Malthus, so popular among right-wing thinkers
and business schools.
Though long and repetitive, like the train itself, “Snowpiercer” suggests it deserves a place among some of the
classic works it draws upon — novels like “Brave New World” and “1984,” and
films like Fritz Lang’s great “Metropolis,” which it copies and even in a sense
updates. It also owes some debts to a wide and various array of
post-apocalyptic dystopian movies, like “The Terminator,” “The Road Warrior,”
and “Soylent Green.”
The darkness and despair of the movie compensate for the
essentially preposterous nature of its central premise. It alternates its
frequent sequences of bloody violence — one torture scene shows something
entirely new in the history of that practice — with a considerable amount of
talky dialogue, some of it rather clumsily didactic. The director occasionally
switches from all the claustrophobic interiors to long shots of the impossibly
long train traversing bridges and plowing through snow drifts, deftly illuminating
the class differences with gradually increasing lighting and a movement from a
kind of chiaroscuroto soothing
pastels. He suggests finally, however, that a dark future awaits us, speeding
through an icy night.
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2014.
