Snowpiercer

South Korean director Joon-ho Bong’s first English film, Snowpiercer, spells out its political theme rather explicitly. Our world depends upon order. Its pragmatic rulers will use all means to sustain a rigid class structure, with everyone knowing their place. When the underclass revolts — as it does here — the derailment is catastrophic. The plot, then, is more reactionary than we might think of a film that celebrates a brave, gory revolution.

The film is a post-apocalyptic version of the 15th Century story of the ship of fools. Mankind is represented as a cross-section of human types on a voyage together. It’s one of our most recurrent plots. In Stagecoach it was a trip to Lordsburg.  The genre anticipates the ‘60s insight: Life is a trip. 

Here the Narrenshippe is a railway train circling the frozen wasted globe carrying the only survivors of a humanly effected ice age. (Take that, damn global warming advocates!) The deep-freeze is a more cinematic spectacle than a meltdown would be, but it mainly serves as a metaphor for the frigid heart that allows the inhumanity of an unyielding class structure.

The railroad owner Wilford (Ed Harris) has made his train a completely self-supporting eco-system. We don’t see how he replenishes the carcasses in the refrigerator car (!). We see the aquarium that produces his sushi, though, so we can extrapolate. Elsie and her herd must be in another car.

The train emblematizes our class structure. The elites inhabit the front section, with their disco, fine dining, tailors, dentists, greenhouse, etc. The tail end houses the nebbishes, kept in vile conditions, to produce children to feed into the machinery that drives the train. The advantaged children are pampered in a sprightly classroom where they are fed eggs and propaganda, both hard boiled.

To preserve the balance the rabble are periodically thinned, including by the odd rebellion such as this one, which our hero Curtis (Chris Evans) is under the illusion he is helping the caboose sage Gilliam (John Hurt) mount. The idealist is gobsmacked to find his hero Gilliam has been in cahoots with the arch-villain Wilford all along. We sensed that when Gilliam tried to stop the rebellion before it went all the way. In this film the system can’t be beat without bringing down the whole world.

Presumably for commercial purposes the film tacks on as happy an ending as it can imagine. An avalanche set off by a rebel’s bomb destroys the train. That rebel has sensed the beginning of a thaw so he wants to get off. But the only survivors are his train-born, constantly stoned daughter and a five-year-old black boy Curtis has rescued from the gears. 
     That pair don’t exactly promise the regeneration of the human race. Adam and Eve they are not. Especially not when a polar bear appears on the new horizon. We’re spared the really happy ending — i.e., the bear hands them a Coke — and the really depressing ending — i.e., the bear has a two-course meal. But those survivors are supposed to make us feel relieved that humanity wasn’t extinguished in that crash.The revolutionaries may have all died but their spirit lives on. Until the bear wipes its chops.