It’s no secret that
Bong Joon-Ho is one of our most talented living filmmakers. Between Memories
of Murder (Zodiac before Zodiac), The Host (an awesome amalgamation that
plays like Little Miss Sunshine meets Jaws) and his
first feature Barking Dogs Never Bite, he’s proven himself quite a
storyteller. His films are thrilling, heartbreaking, hilarious and profound –
often ricocheting between tones to achieve these ends without ever striking a
false note. But as a litany of foreign-born directors making the transition to
their first English picture can attest, their most laudable qualities don’t
always make the trip alongside them. Not the case with Snowpiercer,
the most dizzying blend of action alongside ideas since the first Matrix
film, as Joon-Ho’s voice comes through crystal clear in translation, making
it one of the best films in years.
The premise is
straightforward enough, although there will be those that scoff at it: an
attempt in the near future at cooling the climate change-weakened atmosphere
instead puts the world in a deep freeze, leaving everyone dead. All but
the passengers aboard the Snowpiercer
that is, the invention of mysterious industrialist Wilford, a bullet train that
runs across all of the world’s continents and runs on an eternal engine and
self-sustaining ecosystem. This luxury
was only afforded to the well-off in upper births decked out with all of the
modern comforts, save for those quote-unquote lucky few who muscled their way
into the back of the bus as the world froze around them, a penniless horde left
to live in squalor and slurp on gelatinous protein bars provided by the ‘kind
and beneficent’ Wilford in order to survive. It’s there we meet the stone-faced
leader of the tail-end in Curtis (Captain America himself Chris Evans), and
discover his mutinous plans to take a team of tail-enders (featuring Octavia
Spencer, John Hurt & Jamie Bell among others, all turning in wonderful
supporting work) on a revolutionary tear through the entire train all the way
to the very front where Wilford and this mysterious engine resides. If this
premise sounds ludicrous to you, I’d remind you a society that spins its wheels
and moves in circles while putting their absolute trust in an abstract concept
that regulates itself (think of the eternal engine as Snowpiercer’s free market) while leaving the poor and destitute
to devour one another in the hopes of upward mobility doesn’t ring that false
to me.
The myriad
discoveries of the film are too rich to spoil here – while all the promotional
material has highlighted the dirty, steampunk-influence tail end of the train
where our protagonists survive, their journey to the front reveals an entire
world aboard this ark (and a visually dynamic one at that). Such cramped
quarters wouldn’t suggest an abundance of room with which to maneuver one’s
camera, but Joon-Ho stages numerous action sequences, each of them a
bone-crushingly unique snowflake, throughout the picture. Joon-Ho’s shot
compositions are awe-inspiring, whether it’s a revolutionary relay passing a
torch up the darkness-enveloped cabins or a sushi dinner by the light of the
unthawed outside world, he’s capable of great beauty and pathos through careful
positioning of the camera and guidance of the viewer through that frame. He is
one of most gifted visual storytellers working today, which isn’t even to
mention the delicious screenplay he co-authored with Kelly Masterson, an
incendiary tract filled with righteous zeal that lays bare many of the
hypocrisies we live with now only by setting it in the near-future.
And he’s lucky to have a performer as gifted as Evans in the
lead of this film. Saddled with thanklessly bland hero roles throughout most of
his career, Evans has developed into one hell of an actor. He has a monologue
toward the end of this film that could’ve flummoxed the most talented of
actors, but in his hands proves absolutely devastating. This performance has to
be considered his finest work. Kang-ho Song provides livewire energy as
Namgoong Minsoo, the disgraced security expert who, along with his daughter
Yona (The Host’s Ah-sung Ko, reprising one of the most fruitful pairings
Joon-Ho has ever composed), is busted out of jail in order to facilitate the revolutionary
charge. Drug-addled and struggling to communicate (only doing so with the help
of handheld translators), Minsoo proves the most radical of all the passengers
on board, with his motives slowly unveiling like so many other characters in
the film. But both of these performers
pale in comparison to the work accomplished by Tilda Swinton as the
Thatcher-esque lackey Mason – sporting a prosthetic nose and teeth that make
her nearly unrecognizable, she tears into the character with gusto, crafting an
unforgettable character who truly believes in the inequity perpetuated on this
endless trek.
Snowpiercer is the reason I love the movies—both viscerally
exciting and intellectually stimulating. It is everything I want out of my
filmmaking. We so often have to settle for visually dynamic but soulless cinema
or a movie jam-packed with ideas hamstrung by a miniscule budget or lack of
visual ingenuity, that we need to treat the release of a movie like this that
balances both interests with such dexterity as the minor miracle it is.
Incendiary, thrilling, hilarious and gut-wrenching, Snowpiercer is sci-fi
filmmaking at its finest.
Snowpiercer is now
playing at the AMC Mayfair and receives my highest recommendation.
