Introduction
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Let’s face it. Most movies nowadays are crap. They are mass produced, mindless works that regurgitate the same story lines told in a slightly different way. They hold the viewers hand and walk them through fast moving actions scenes of color and anger and bombard them with dim witted humor that isn’t all that funny. Often they have no real depth and they produce about as much thought in the viewer as watching an old man mowing the lawn in his pajamas on a Sunday morning.
High concept – low brain films.
These movies act as a cheap form of single serving entertainment and they are often forgotten almost immediately after watching them.
OK, that was a bit of a rant and probably vastly exaggerated, but you get the idea that most movies today are crap and needless to say, it’s hard to find good movies these days that are thought provoking and which have relevant messages to the viewer about the world we live in today.
One movie that is a seemingly unlikely exception to this, is the movie Snowpiercer.
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I will admit that the movie is a bit cheesy at times due to its low budget and some of the dialogue a bit lacking. It also walks the viewer through the story so it doesn’t require a whole lot of thinking to understand what is going on in the moment. However, overall the film is very thought provoking and it contains many messages that not always obvious to the viewer and which are relevant to today’s world.
With that being said, this post is a multi-part article that first reviews the movie Snowpiercer and then discusses its overall themes and messages.
Synopsis
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Snowpiercer is a low budget film that was produced in 2013 that is based on a French graphic novel that goes by a similar name. Though it was produced and directed by South Korean’s, it was marketed for an American audience and has a predominantly English speaking, American cast (with some exceptions).
The movie takes place in a future world in which a human experiment in climate change sends the world into extremely cold temperatures and creates a new ice age. The event inadvertently kills off all life on the planet with the exception of the last remaining people who have managed to survive on a massive train known as the Snowpiercer.
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The train was designed by an engineer named Wilford, who is a mysterious figure of legend and basically who is worshipped like a sort of biblical prophet. The passengers of the train have been divided into a class system with the low status individuals living in the filth of the back of the train, economy class living in the middle and the upper class individuals live in opulence at the front. The three classes of people are heavily divided by physical and psychological barriers within the train’s environment.
This self-contained ecosystem known as Snowpiercer, continuously travels around the planet while the movie periodically hints at the notion that if the train stops “we all freeze and die.”
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Since this article ended up being quite lengthy, I decided to break it into several parts. Part II will discuss the films plot and part III will discuss some of the major themes and messages of the movie and how they relate to our world today.