I Watch Films: Snowpiercer
Attempts to reverse global warming have caused the world to freeze. The last of humanity – possibly the last of life on earth – is now on a big train that circumnavigates the world once a year*.
In the tail of the train are a lot of people who are kept in what’s basically a refugee camp, maintained by brutal guards and occasionally lectured by Tilda Swinton. The leaders, John Hurt and Chris Evans, plan a revolt. They intend to get to the front of the train and take it over; mysterious messages suggest that if they can get through the first three gates to the prison section, a security specialist kept there can get them through the rest.
What awaits them as they travel through the train to the front is mostly brutal violence, punctuated by weird carriages with odd designs. (A problem with the train is that no one has anything to do, which the designer, train-mad as he is, perhaps did not think a problem, or may have arisen due to the unexpected events surrounding the freezing of the world. The forward passengers get to live a life of hedonism, those in the rear have nothing else but rebellion.)
Watch This: For an exciting action film that makes some not too subtle political-economic points
Don’t Watch This: If you don’t like trains
* In ABSOLUTELY the least of the questions raised by the film, does the train go slower in a leap year? The most sensible idea would be to stop on 29 February (for maintenance?). However as the train never stops and no one ever gets out that’s not an option. The map we briefly see has sections labelled with highdays and holidays suggesting that it arrives at the same place at the same date and time every year. Anyway this is not the point.
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