Monday, July 14, 2014

Review: Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2014)

Snowpiercer is Korean genius Bong Joon-Ho’s first English language feature – he directed Memories of Murder, The Host and Mother – and it is based on Jacques Lob’s graphic novel Le Transperceneige. Bong wrote the screenplay along with Kelly Masterson (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead), and the result is as spectacularly ambitious, thought provoking and entertaining a science fiction entry as Bong’s esteemed credentials promise.


The film is set in the year 2031, and the world is a frozen and uninhabitable. Seventeen years earlier measures were taken to stop global warming, but the experiment was a disaster, killing everything in the process. Those lucky enough to survive boarded the giant rattling ark called the Snowpiercer, a train that circumnavigates the globe over the course of exactly one year.

We are first introduced to those living in the back of the train, the lowest class. They sleep cramped together, their hygiene is appalling, their only source of food is a manufactured protein block distributed once per day, they are beaten and mistreated by the train’s guards and have been deprived everything that the upper class forward carriages consume in lavish excess. Amongst these tail-dwellers are Curtis (Chris Evans), Edgar (Jamie Bell), Gilliam (William Hurt) and Tanya (Octavia Spencer), and they are desperate to shake up the world order.

Continue reading at Graffiti With Punctuation

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