Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-Ho, 2013)
Several years into the future, the earth is engulfed by ice caused by humanity attempting to reverse the effects of global warming. Except for the passengers aboard a train that perpetually chugs along a route that spans the entire world, everybody else has frozen to death. The world, as a result, has been shrunk within the confines of a luxury train.
Cinema has always maintained its love affair with trains since it utilized a steam engine rampaging towards the unsuspecting audience as the prime spectacle in The Great Train Robbery in 1903. With strangers forced to interact and socialize within limited spaces, the cramped and claustrophobic interiors of trains become apt stages for suspense and mystery, as with Alfred Hitchcock’s Strangers in a Train in 1951 or the many adaptations of Agatha Christie’s Murder in the Orient Express.
In 1964, John Frankenheimer, acknowledging the potential of the locomotive to evoke excitement and urgency, released The Train where Burt Lancaster attempts to save art treasures from the greedy clutches of the Nazis. Josef von Sternberg’s Shanghai Express, set on an express train from Beijing to Shanghai, envelopes its sordid tale with the exoticism of travel. In 2005, Tickets, featuring three episodes directed by Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach and Ermanno Olmi, emphasized the social stratification that is part and parcel of travelling by train.
With Snowpiercer, which is based on the graphic novel Le Transperceneige, Bong exposes the same fascination with trains that has consumed the many filmmakers that preceded him. The film, which concerns itself largely with the oppressive social divide that was created supposedly for the survival of the last remaining human beings that exist inside the train, has Curtis (Chris Evans), a resident of the unfortunate tail section of the train, spearheading a revolution to reach the engine where the train’s creator, the mysterious Wilford (Ed Harris), lives.
At once, Bong capitalizes on the innate inequity of the class structure that train travel subsists on. The first class passengers will eat steak and have all the amenities their first class existence naturally provides them. The passengers in the tail end, stowaways whose lives are owed supposedly to the generosity of the first class passengers, will have to satisfy themselves with dregs.
Bong begins with the concept, before enlarging it as his characters move forward, discovering that humanity does not revolve around the injustice they personally suffer but also about structures, norms and measures that have become necessary for both survival and the containment of the evils humanity is capable of. By the end of the film, inequity becomes the least of humanity’s problems, as humanity bares its fundamental monstrosity. The stakes cascade and the lines blur as the plot thickens.
Snowpiercer however is a lot more fun than it sounds. Not only does Bong capitalize on themes that are readily available because of his use of the train as a centerpiece to his tale, he also capitalizes on the physical traits of the train to create a more visceral viewing experience. He understands the mechanics of the train’s narrow space. He himself limits his camera within the finite borders of the train, and creates action sequences that have realistic depth. The brutality that bolsters the film’s themes is therefore more palpable with bodies being hacked and abused within close distances.
The perpetual movement of the train also plays a big role in Bong’s well-orchestrated spectacle. The film follows the incessant rhythm and velocity of the vehicle as it avoids being stalled unnecessarily. Even its lengthy expositions are accompanied by wit and absurd pageantry, as exemplified by Tilda Swinton’s histrionic portrayal of a high-ranking bully. Snowpiercer is precise in its intent to primarily entertain and exhilarate despite its fluent observations on the human condition.
Snowpiercer is loud and brazen. It is consistently hilarious, yet at the same time, it also never fails to inflict fear, suspense or sentiment whenever it needs to do so. Snowpiercer is Bong’s outrageous ode to trains, to their power that have always fascinated us, and to everything else they can ever represent. This is also his tribute to cinema, which has the power to turn the lowly and hardworking train into an emblem for how humanity has remained woefully unchanged despite its years of persistent existence.
Thanks for this! Well, the train also pertains to the classic, standard definition of the bourgeouis, which is that they're only concerned w/ 'the trains running on time'. This is made apparent with the sushi bars, the nightclubs, and the preparatory schools, and their horrible social costs, with what it takes to keep these sorts of things going ( i.e. how the use of children plays out in the stunning reveal ).
ReplyDeleteIn fact, it is rather progressive in its interpretation and analysis, in its depiction of class collaborators, even within the subjugated, and how the so-called 'animalistic traits' of humans are caused by conditions and external forces, instead of being inherent. For example, the Tail End folks weren't eating people at the beginning; in fact, they're refugees like anybody else, and what we’ll probably be if we are imprisoned in a train for years without water and food. A train that isn't theirs and isn't made theirs, even as they're all the last humans on the planet. Scenes of the Yolanda aftermath are immediately brought into mind by the accounts of their suffering.
Yet what is endearing is how the film trusts mankind enough to show that, even at the lowest ebb, humans are still capable of making noble choices, with how community plays in the continued survival of the tail section people, and with the one real heroic act that the lead exhibits. It is rather telling that the Tail End Section types were the ones who’ve been effectively repopulating the race. Front End types can only shoot them.
And these are real choices of life and death, freedom and survival, solidarity and cooperation - not absent minded ones which depend upon messianic narratives, and the bleakest absolutes, but the ones that people are faced with everyday. Narratives prove to be of little use in the larger scheme of things; especially in a reality that is more defined by causality than predestination. In fact, they’re merely repressive. Not to mention fascist.
So it also belies the typical boogeyman of status quo apologists, which posits that there is nothing but apocalypse or death outside the current social order, or the aforementioned narrative. Through this, it becomes a sci fi story of the more classic vein, among the first major ones in years, which doesn't merely rely on downbeat superstition, or gadget porn, but craft, ingenuity, and yes, scientific thinking a.k.a. the objective search for solutions and alternatives in the face of a problem. People don't have to be stuck in the middle ages. They can move forward, even beyond the trains that they depend on.
In the end, what the train needs is not another operator, even one from a minority or a lower socio-economic class. What the train needs is to be destroyed.
This movie defeats the mysticism of The Matrix and The Dark Knight Rises.
P.S. The version screening in the Philippines right now is the Director's Cut.
The train doesn't rampage towards the screen in "The Great Train Robbery." You're thinking of the Lumiere brothers' film of a train's arrival at La Ciotat.
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