Tuesday, September 30th, 2014 | TechNews

 

Austin Gonzalez
OPINION EDITOR

Director Ioon-ho Bong’s most recent
film, Snowpiercer, crashed onto the big screen
accompanied by cheers of critical acclaim.
When it comes to rotten tomatoes, the movie
attained a 95%, “certified fresh”, rating; the
consensus was that Snowpiercer offers a spec-
tacle the likes of which have been sorely missed
by movie-goers, particularly those “numb to
effects—driven blockbusters.” The cast is filled
with well—liked actors including Tilda Swinton
and Chris Evens. Snowpiercer unfortunately is
one of the worst movies in recent years. The
plot is contrived, stale, and is another example
of poor taste on the part of everyone involved.

In the future, an attempt to fix cli-
mate change has gone horribly wrong, usher-
ing in a new ice age. All life is destroyed on the
desolate earth except for those lucky few who
managed to board the Snowpiercer.

This globe-trotting, miles—long train
comes complete with an oppressed lower class
and ignorant rich people living in opulence.
The maintenance of the track and train as it
treks through the frozen wasteland is merely
meant to be assumed by the audience. A train
from Chicago to the suburbs needs repair ev-
ery few months and has accidents on the track
more often than that. But a train that encircles
the globe, through glaciers and mountains of
snow and ice, for 18 years built on the whim of
a fabulously rich man preparing for a dooms-
day runs without a bitch in either the track or
the train; that’s just logic. “The engine runs for—
ever.” It’s the future, a future where an ice age
was caused by global warming.

A lower class of several hundred
people are kept sequestered in the back few
cars, kept alive by being fed jellied bricks remi-

niscent of Soylent. They are beaten and abused
by a militaristic order or guards, with the clas-
sic intelligence of a door stop.

A religion of sorts keeps the cult of
the train alive. The idea of a preordained class
system comes into play as the reason for the
separation of the rich and the poor. We find
out later that the rich bought tickets on the
train, while the poor merely climbed in the
back few cars which were open. Then they
were sealed in for many months without food
or water. The population on this train, the last
bastion of humanity, must be kept in check and
of course that means killing poor people from
time to time.

The actual storyline is just as ridicu-
lous and inane as the back history. The only
problem with the story is that the discussions
it leads to don’t come from the mow‘e itself.
People afterwards will be filled with righteous
anger against the upper class which oppresses
them. In Snowpiercer, the worst the rich can be
accused of is gross ignorance and being high
all the time. All the time! There is a master-
mind who controls the story, the train, and
the people This is a reasonable allegory to the
way those who have the power to abuse it, and
those who have comfort become short sighted.
It’s a shame that all that people garner from
this is that rich people are evil.

Featuring tasteless trope after trope,
it’s with great luck that the movie-goers who
are numb to effects-driven films are not yet
numb to class warfare stories. With any luck,
Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner,
Snowpiercer, etc. will become the standard so
we can watch these future dystopias get torn
down over and over and over again. I suppose
one note of merit is that this time we’ve man-
aged to escape the teenage protagonist and love

story.

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Image courtesy of sniercer-film.com