Movie Review: Snowpiercer
T.R.U.E., Week of 7/8/ Post #2
Snowpiercer
Took me maybe ten minutes. I think, in part, because of the CGI. A train movie without a train? Without actual train sound? I mean, of all the great analog experiences over on this side of the Oculus Rift, riding the rails has to rate right up there with slipping a needle into a record groove. Or kissing someone.
Also, the post-apocalyptic thing has got to be the most played out genre by now except maybe for vampire fiction (hey, wait a minute...)
Also, with these class-metaphor sci-fi films like the wildly overrated District 9 , the allegory tends to be so heavy-handed, and this one is no exception, and yeah, the world really seems to be tilting that way, but...
Then, all of a sudden, I was all in. All aboard. If I had my way, I'd be riding, still.
A man-made effort to curb global warming results in a cataclysm, freezing the entire planet and extinguishing all life except the few hundred souls lucky enough to scramble on board the titular train, which boasts a perpetually rechargeable engine, and which commences endlessly circling Europe. Theoretically, forever.
The wealthy enjoy the luxurious appointments and accommodations up front, dine on steaks and fresh produce grown in the atrium. The lower classes get mashed together, stacked in impossibly small bunks in filthy quarters in the back. They eat black, gelatinous protein cubes. Several times previously, the poor have rebelled, attempted to smash through through to the front car. The next revolution, everyone senses, will be the last. One way or another.
So many things work in this dazzling, devastating, riveting movie. Even the CGI train does, somehow, cast that trainspell, eventually. Lulls and chatters you into this world. What seems another obvious, one-track plot keeps shunting sideways, darting down unexpected branch lines. There are several stunning reveals that are completely set up, laid like track right in front of us. But the brutal fighting and the bizarre characters and surprisingly playful steampunk design flourishes keep distracting, and so we keep getting surprised.
A couple moments here are all-timers, will be shown on reels at ceremonies 50 years from now. Most of all, I suspect, the New Year's celebration, which occurs every time the train reaches and crosses the Yekaterina Bridge.
I have no idea what Tilda Swinton thinks she was doing, but she was having a blast doing it, and I had a blast watching her.
And though the action is blunt and bruising (and fun, despite the fact that we are never allowed to forget that these are actual people being hurt), the thinking is surprisingly subtle. As in the idea that in a denuded, devastated, crushingly overpopulated world-in-microcosm, the rich man's greatest luxury is going to be solitude.
Snowpiercer
Took me maybe ten minutes. I think, in part, because of the CGI. A train movie without a train? Without actual train sound? I mean, of all the great analog experiences over on this side of the Oculus Rift, riding the rails has to rate right up there with slipping a needle into a record groove. Or kissing someone.
Also, the post-apocalyptic thing has got to be the most played out genre by now except maybe for vampire fiction (hey, wait a minute...)
Also, with these class-metaphor sci-fi films like the wildly overrated District 9 , the allegory tends to be so heavy-handed, and this one is no exception, and yeah, the world really seems to be tilting that way, but...
Then, all of a sudden, I was all in. All aboard. If I had my way, I'd be riding, still.
A man-made effort to curb global warming results in a cataclysm, freezing the entire planet and extinguishing all life except the few hundred souls lucky enough to scramble on board the titular train, which boasts a perpetually rechargeable engine, and which commences endlessly circling Europe. Theoretically, forever.
The wealthy enjoy the luxurious appointments and accommodations up front, dine on steaks and fresh produce grown in the atrium. The lower classes get mashed together, stacked in impossibly small bunks in filthy quarters in the back. They eat black, gelatinous protein cubes. Several times previously, the poor have rebelled, attempted to smash through through to the front car. The next revolution, everyone senses, will be the last. One way or another.
So many things work in this dazzling, devastating, riveting movie. Even the CGI train does, somehow, cast that trainspell, eventually. Lulls and chatters you into this world. What seems another obvious, one-track plot keeps shunting sideways, darting down unexpected branch lines. There are several stunning reveals that are completely set up, laid like track right in front of us. But the brutal fighting and the bizarre characters and surprisingly playful steampunk design flourishes keep distracting, and so we keep getting surprised.
A couple moments here are all-timers, will be shown on reels at ceremonies 50 years from now. Most of all, I suspect, the New Year's celebration, which occurs every time the train reaches and crosses the Yekaterina Bridge.
I have no idea what Tilda Swinton thinks she was doing, but she was having a blast doing it, and I had a blast watching her.
And though the action is blunt and bruising (and fun, despite the fact that we are never allowed to forget that these are actual people being hurt), the thinking is surprisingly subtle. As in the idea that in a denuded, devastated, crushingly overpopulated world-in-microcosm, the rich man's greatest luxury is going to be solitude.
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