Snowpiercer (2013)
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
In a future where a failed global-warming experiment kills off most life on the planet, a class system evolves aboard the Snowpiercer; a train that travels around the globe via a perpetual-motion engine.
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The latter is so named in an affectionate nod to an overt inspiration, Terry Gilliam, who conjured memorable sci-fi grotesqueries in Brazil and 12 Monkeys; the same courtesy could have plausibly been extended to Jeunet and Caro or Lang, whose similarly visionary futuristic pictures of spoilt humanity certainly influenced this one.
While Bong's movies are typically anchored in a greater degree of credibility than his contemporaries Kim Jee-woon and Park Chan-wook (the latter is a producer here), "Snowpiercer" reflects the expressive aspects found in all of their works as well as many others, with its dystopian elements echoing countless precedents — from "Brazil" (there's even a newly developed character slyly named Gilliam) to "Mad Max" and "The Matrix," as well as the mother of them all, George Orwell's "1984."
If the name "Gilliam" set off a little tremor of excitement when you heard it that is no accident because, with its combination of startling visuals, a head-spinning storyline and oddball characters that don't always conform to their presumed parameters, "Snowpiercer" is a film definitely in the vein of the works of the great Terry Gilliam , especially his 1985 landmark " Brazil " (which, funnily enough, also had a distributor that was originally unwilling to release it without massive cuts).
You can see the film’s nods to “Brazil” and other similar, less mobile dystopias — the secret of the food supply for the back-of-the-train passengers evokes “The Matrix,” while the need for the young to serve the state touches on everything from “Logan’s Run” to the tale of Minos of Crete.
Bong’s cluttered, gadgety mise-en-scène is reminiscent of Terry Gilliam’s cult film Brazil, particularly once the proles break through into the forward cars—one is an aquarium, another is a greenhouse; there’s also a kindergarten, and a finally the inevitable orgiastic disco.
Their hero is Curtis (Chris Evans), a forthright and determined type who puts thought into action, and consults his elder leader, Gilliam, who’s surely named after Terry Gilliam, whose work in “Brazil” is one of Joon-ho’s references, and who’s played by John Hurt, forever linked to philosophical dystopia for starring in “1984.”
The sci-fi genre has been clogged lately with films that run the gamut between young adult soap operas to a film like “Snowpiercer” that is reminiscent of a future akin to that of the future shock of “Soylent Green” or to a lesser extent the latest “Purge” offering.
Snowpiercer‘s comic book origins are most apparent in these moments, and references to everything from Dark City to Takeshi Miike to Soylent Green can be found littered everywhere else.
Metropolis (1926), The Time Machine (1960), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Soylent Green (1973), Blade Runner (1982) and Dark City (1998) all were forerunners of The Hunger Games , Divergent , and even the Transformer series.
The post-apocalyptic film has been done many times before – “Soylent Green,” “A Boy and His Dog,” “The Mad Max” trilogy, “Waterworld” are just some.
While Bong's movies are typically anchored in a greater degree of credibility than his contemporaries Kim Jee-woon and Park Chan-wook (the latter is a producer here), "Snowpiercer" reflects the expressive aspects found in all of their works as well as many others, with its dystopian elements echoing countless precedents — from "Brazil" (there's even a newly developed character slyly named Gilliam) to "Mad Max" and "The Matrix," as well as the mother of them all, George Orwell's "1984."
You can see the film’s nods to “Brazil” and other similar, less mobile dystopias — the secret of the food supply for the back-of-the-train passengers evokes “The Matrix,” while the need for the young to serve the state touches on everything from “Logan’s Run” to the tale of Minos of Crete.
Watching it, I was reminded of the first time I experienced The Matrix or District 9. Snowpiercer sucks you into its strange, brave new world so completely, it leaves you with the all too rare sensation that you've just witnessed something you've never seen before...and need to see again and again.
They’re bribed into aiding the revolutionaries with the highly addictive hallucinogenic drug kronole, which adds Alice In Wonderland and The Matrix to the long list of pop-cult references Snowpiercer conjures up.
With shades of Brazil and The Matrix , Snowpiercer shifts between social satire, superb action sequences, and a vaguely philosophical "The train is, like, a metaphor for civilization , man" bent.
Metropolis (1926), The Time Machine (1960), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Soylent Green (1973), Blade Runner (1982) and Dark City (1998) all were forerunners of The Hunger Games , Divergent , and even the Transformer series.
The movie projects as outlandishly blunt a social metaphor as any movie since Fritz Lang’s 1927 Metropolis envisioned a futuristic New York wherein the workers lived and labored in a realm below the subway while their rulers cavorted in rooftop gardens higher than the Empire State Building.
If Bong movies like Memories of Murder and Barking Dogs Don’t Bite established a fondness for the edge of 1970’s American cinema, and The Host adopted the paranoid wonder of young Spielberg, Snowpiercer forages for sustenance in the work of cinematic sci-fi pioneers like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, showing a particular fondness for Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
This is something of a trend, as Bong’s movie joins with such recent works as “Elysium” and “The Hunger Games” series to be among the most class-conscious science-fiction epics since Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis,” which was released in 1927, as if in anticipation of the imminent worldwide economic depression.
El posapocalipsis ferroviario parece surgir artísticamente de la conjunción o confluencia imaginativa de tres poetas visionarios tan genialmente irreductibles como Dante (su poema La Divina Comedia), Fritz Lang (su ambiguo filme anticipatorio Metrópolis 27) y Ernst Jünger (su premonitoria novela crítica velada pero toleradamente antihitleriana El trabajador 32), al primero se le debe la excelsitud mantuana de esa invención de círculos infernales que son vagones que son secciones del tren (sección de cola, sección de cuarentena, sección de prisión, sección de agua, sección de frente), pero también la añoranza del bistec, del rostro materno, de la tierra olvidada o jamás vista, del póstumo cigarrillo y el postrer cerillo, o de las balas hace años extintas; a Lang y a su paradigmática parábola distópica se le debe sin duda esa atroz segregación plástica de los irremediables trabajadores esclavizados en geométricos grupos compactos para recibir sentados el indoctrinamiento nuestro de cada…
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An ambitious and stylish sci-fi epic, its vivid production design brings to mind Brazil and Blade Runner, with narrative tinges of The Truman Show and Children of Men.
Metropolis (1926), The Time Machine (1960), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Soylent Green (1973), Blade Runner (1982) and Dark City (1998) all were forerunners of The Hunger Games , Divergent , and even the Transformer series.
If Bong movies like Memories of Murder and Barking Dogs Don’t Bite established a fondness for the edge of 1970’s American cinema, and The Host adopted the paranoid wonder of young Spielberg, Snowpiercer forages for sustenance in the work of cinematic sci-fi pioneers like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, showing a particular fondness for Terry Gilliam’s Brazil.
Echoing the dystopian brilliance of Blade Runner and Brazil and beset by remarkably similar studio wrangling over the final cut, Snowpiercer is an audacious, immersive and nightmarish masterpiece.
Ya sea por el desolado paisaje polar que se observa fuera del tren, el alucinante diseño de escenografías que hacen de sus interiores un deleite visual o por el maravilloso elenco multi nacional, el trabajo más reciente del coreano es tan puntual en lo que quiere significar, tan dinámico en su realización y tan estilizado en su visión que no cuesta trabajo imaginar un futuro (esperemos menos distópico que el aquí presentado) en donde la película se convierta en un referente como trabajos de la talla de la ya mencionada The Matrix u otros clásicos como A Clockwork Orange y Blade Runner.
At which point “Snowpiercer” sheds the close-quarters claustrophobia of the first half (which nods to such classic cinematic railway fare as “The Narrow Margin” and “Runaway Train”) in favor of a more expansive vision.
It’s a tradition that runs from Hitchcock’s Lifeboat to the likes of Cube and The Raid (for static, or relatively static locations); and taking in Speed , Runaway Train , Air Force One , and Lars von Trier’s Europa (closed spaces that actually move).
The quest of the bedraggled tail-enders feels like a bloody “The Wizard of Oz” set on a “Runaway Train,” with each section they assault a revelation.
Then there’s Andrei Konchalovsky’s Runaway Train and the hellbent rapture of Denzel Washington and Chris Pine trying to brake the runaway in Tony Scott’s Unstoppable.
If you must, it’s Runaway Train meets Brazil — Kurosawa and Gilliam, together at last.
The mid-level genre fans may need a reminder that Bong Joon-ho directed Memories of Murder (2003), The Host (2006), and Mother (2009), and then they’re in for Snowpiercer .
The Host (2006); Mother (2009)), has adapted the French graphic novel, Le Transperceneige , and the result is gleefully entertaining and conceptually refreshing.
But if you think that Bong, the mad genre stylist behind 2006's The Host and 2009's Mother, felt pressure to play it safe in his English-language debut, guess again.
He made me both laugh and cringe in a deadpan black comedy "Barking Dogs Never Bite" (2000), and then he played me like a piano in his great rural-set thriller film "Memories of Murder" (2003), and then he surprised me with monster film "The Host" (2006), and then he came back to another thriller set in the countryside in "Mother" (2009).
Bong’s masterstroke at delivering both depth and suspense, as evident in his films such as Memories Or Murder (2003) and Mother (2009), is used to scintillating effect through a well written narrative that exploits the limited space on a train that provides the perfect location for Bong’s sci-fi adventure.
Conceived by South Korean writer/director Bong Joon Ho (Mother [a 2009 Cannes nominee], Tokyo, The Host), after he discovered the French graphic novel “Le Transperceneige” in a bookshop in Seoul, he was struck by the cinematic possibilities.
The claustrophobic, forcibly focused tunnel vision suggests the situation of the doomed sewer-trapped partisans in Polish director Andrzej Wajda’s Kanal (1956), a film about the Warsaw uprising; the continuous trajectory is reminiscent of David Cronenberg’s Cosmopolis (2012), set almost entirely in a limo crawling through midtown Manhattan traffic.
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Metropolis (1926), The Time Machine (1960), A Clockwork Orange (1971), Soylent Green (1973), Blade Runner (1982) and Dark City (1998) all were forerunners of The Hunger Games , Divergent , and even the Transformer series.
Ya sea por el desolado paisaje polar que se observa fuera del tren, el alucinante diseño de escenografías que hacen de sus interiores un deleite visual o por el maravilloso elenco multi nacional, el trabajo más reciente del coreano es tan puntual en lo que quiere significar, tan dinámico en su realización y tan estilizado en su visión que no cuesta trabajo imaginar un futuro (esperemos menos distópico que el aquí presentado) en donde la película se convierta en un referente como trabajos de la talla de la ya mencionada The Matrix u otros clásicos como A Clockwork Orange y Blade Runner.
One thing you do have to credit Joon-Ho (The Host, Memories of Murder) with is creating a wholly immersive post-apocalypse as desolate as anything Max Rockatansky endured, with the front cars reminiscent of Downunder from A Boy and His Dog.
The post-apocalyptic film has been done many times before – “Soylent Green,” “A Boy and His Dog,” “The Mad Max” trilogy, “Waterworld” are just some.