Movie review: ‘Snowpiercer’ takes you on a wild ride

The poster for this flick coupled with its title make for some unfortunate opportunities for sexual innuendo. I mean really, if no one realized how incredibly phallic that perspective of the train looks on that promo poster—anyway, when you take that and the unfortunate trailer you get the feeling that Snowpiercer is some low-rent straight-to-DVD material that's just dropped on our shores because Hollywood can make a few bucks from the foreign market. But my gosh what a mistake those assumptions would be.

The movie is directed by a Korean director, with support from Korean and Austrian units, and shot in the Czech Republic. You've got a smattering of people from various nationalities and ethnicities.

But look at some of those names on that cast: Chris Evans, Tilda Swinton, John Hurt, Ed Harris. Those are some heavy hitters, man. So while this movie lacks the snazziness of a Hollywood marketing push, it benefits from not being bound to the conventions of Hollywood filmmaking.

We are dropped into the suffocating confines of a train. This is one of the brilliant things about the film. The conceit is what remains of humanity inhabits this train, and on this train there is a clear and enforced class divide where the head of the train runs things and in the tail are the dregs of society forever kept in their place. The rest of the world is gone, frozen due to climate change. The train is run by its designer who is treated like a god, who reinforces and controls the "balance of the system" through authoritarian means under the guise of benevolence.

The discourse that the film establishes, with the ruling classes using force, enculturation, and belief systems to rationalize the oppression of the lower classes, isn't anything new. But it enables the film to jump straight into the action.

In other post-apocalyptic films we spend a lot of time establishing what the resistance is about, watching them plan their rebellion, and there's a lot of suspense spent on seeing if their plan would be found out. In "Snowpiercer", they don't bother with any of that. We're shown the wretched circumstances, we get an over-the-top monologue from a bat-guano crazy Tilda Swinton laying out the social dynamics of the train while a dude's arm is frozen and shattered with a sledgehammer, and we're off and running.

The resistance begins half an hour into the film and it doesn't let up throughout. The conceit of all the action being contained in this self-sustaining train works to make all of this action move and provide physical space.

The characters struggle from the tail to the head. This allows for some massive opening sequences. Another smart thing the film does is rather than go from small conflicts to big conflicts, it starts with big mob action. We've got two large groups going at each other. Then the film whittles down its characters and develops them as we go along. It's pretty smart, because one problem of a lot of rebellion films is we lose track of our heroes in the milieu. Here we move towards a focus on the individual characters.

The characters progress through the train, and this train is really a triumph of imagination and production design. It's like Noah's Ark but with social stratification. There are a lot of interesting statements here about culture, class, and education, just from the way that the visuals are juxtaposed against each other. One of the joys in this film is going from one kind of train car to the next. We open on the terrible circumstances of the tail, which feel like post-Cold War: dark, metallic and dingy, and we think this is all that's left of the world, this misery. And then we are revealed the luxury and opulence of other train cars—and in one of the best and most jarring and imaginatively messed up sequences, a kiddie classroom with Alison Pill doing a true believer/zealot teaching pitch inculcating the belief system to these annoying privileged kids.

So much happens in this movie, and there's so much imagination and excitement at work. The premise on its face seems a bit flat, and the trailer does it no favors by making it seem like a crappy little thing about a mob fighting in a train. But once you get through that bad marketing and actually experience the film, you get a very entertaining action movie. Because there are so many events, you get this great pacing.

The train, and everything in it, is moving at an extreme and uncontrollable velocity. The fight sequences are many and each of them is different from the others. Don't want to spoil anything, but there are times when things go dark and you'll find yourself out of breath. And this flick doesn't need to rely on CG or fancy tricks. It's a lot of straight-up staging and good camera work.

There's an info dump at the end, and things don't all seem to fall into place. But getting there is its own reward. For most of this movie's more than two hours, you are driven through this great world at breakneck speed. The movie lets you catch your breath a few times, before dragging you through things again. It's a great ride throughout, and if you're looking for a post-apocalyptic action flick, this has the goods. — BM, GMA News

"Snowpiercer" is now showing in Metro Manila theaters.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own.