Film Review: Snowpiercer *** 1/2
Snowpiercer expertly sets up expectations to the final confrontation with Wilfred at the head of the train, building weight as Cutris makes his way to the front and the inevitable confrontation. Along the way, we hear many things about Wilfred. Mason (an unrecognizable Tilda Swinton doing her best Margaret Thatcher) tells us Wilfred is benevolent and like a God. We see a propaganda film demonstrating Wilfred’s ability to manipulate the masses with horrific combination of a church and school. Despite Wilfred’s obvious propaganda, the brilliance of his engineering design cannot be questioned. The self-sustaining engine although called divine is an incredible achievement. Even Gilliam, Curtis’ mentor and the natural leader of the rear of the train, tells us that Wilfred is not to be trusted and that the first thing Curtis should do is cut out his tongue.
One of the shortfalls of the Snowpiercer is actually the strength of the second act climax. After arriving at the gates of Wilfred in the front of the train, our two heroes trade monologues with each other. Chris Evans, an incredible Curtis, in this moment reveals himself to be a great actor, carrying the gravitas of the moment and finally explaining why Curtis has such loyalty to Gilliam, Edgar, and, most importantly, why he is such a reluctant hero. This is the best scene in the entire film. Nothing dramatically afterword equals its weight and that’s an issue. The film after feels like it’s losing steam. The meeting with Wilfred feels like a necessity, something the film must do, rather than the weight of the scene promised us by Joon Ho. The director has so expertly crafted the movie that the entire weight of it lurches forward from car to car to the climatic reveal of Wilfred which does not equal the weight of what came before it.
In many ways, Joon-ho’s structure set up him up for failure. So much attention and time is spent talking about Wilfred and developing him that nothing on the other side of that vault would have satisfied the audience’s expectations. After all, Wilfred is divine. That was the same conundrum confronting Francis Ford Coppola in Apocalypse Now which has a very similar narrative structure to Snowpiercer. In Apocalypse Now the river propels Willard towards Kurtz and everything grows to the inevitable battle between Willard and him. But, Coppola pulled off a miracle. The performance by Marlon Brando as Kurtz actually fulfills the two hours of build up. He is a character as Coppola said who is struggling with the extremities of his soul and not on one simple reduced philosophical or psychological level but on many layered levels. Although the brilliance of casting Ed Harris as Wilfred works, reminding us of his control of the mission in Apollo 13 or his almost God-like powers in The Truman Show, Ed Harris has little to work with. Wilfred is revealed as a one trick pony.
What Wilfred offers Curtis is nothing enticing. His simplistic philosophy is not even really explored or explained. Unlike Kurtz who goes through the process of teaching Willard, Wilfred doesn’t even offer any real reason for Curtis to believe his philosophy. And yet, we are supposed to believe Curtis’ conversion and his imminent decision to replace Wilfred as the engineer on the train. There is a shot of Wilfred standing behind Curtis when Yona (the daughter of the engineer they rescues to help get them to the front of the train) runs up to him asking for the matches. The shot is the same shot from earlier in the film when Edgar lies below Curtis on a bunk and Curtis is staring towards the ceiling. It is in that moment that Curtis asks Edgar how far back he remembers, almost convincing himself that they must go on because of the horrific memory of Edgar’s mother that Curtis contains. This revolution must happen because of those memories. In a similar sense, he is about to accept Wilfred’s gift of the train and yet nothing has been said or done that would cause Curtis’ character to change and accept it. Wilfred does not convince us of his beliefs let alone someone who has hated him his entire life. As his monologue stated which I do believe, for eighteen years I’ve hated this man and waited for this day. Yes, he has. He hasn’t waited to do this. I don’t buy his wavering of faith.
Back in the rear of the train, Gilliam warns Curtis not to let Wilfred speak, to cut out his tongue. I think that the movie would have done better to have played with that ambiguity rather than having Curtis believe Wilfred so quickly. The only possible gain from that decision is moving the movie to its conclusion as quickly as possible.
The conclusion of the film also leaves much to be desired from the incredible film that comes before. Throughout the film, the train is referred to as an “ark”. We are meant to take it as Noah’s Ark. Humanity’s last refuge from the curse of God to destroy the world for man’s hubris. Like the ark, which carried the survivors of the human race to repopulate the Earth and survived the storm to float for forty days, the train carries with it the last vestige of mankind. And similarly to the ark, when the flood waters recede, the survivors disembark to see a dove, a sign of life returning to the Earth.
I hate to read such a simplistic interpretation of the ending, but it is the film through these references to the ark and the fact that it is both children (representing a new generation) and a boy and girl (representing Adam and Eve) that exit the train at the end that I believe the director does want you to have a feeling of elation that humanity is restarting to make it better. However this simplistic ending does not serve the incredible film that comes before it. It does not solve or deal with the idea of controlled ecosystems and the idea that everything has a place. Instead, we get the image of a polar bear and while environmentalists will cheer that the sign of a large predator alive means that there is a healthy ecosystem as it must survive and are usually the first to die off. I couldn’t help but think that the polar bear is going to eat both of them.
From the sound of this take on Ben review, it sounds like I hate Snowpiecer and nothing could be further from the truth. I feel like I do with some Spielberg films where he piles on his happy ending regardless of the film he’s making. Spielberg is undoubtedly one of the best directors of our time and his talents have created some enduring masterpieces, but when his worst instincts take over him, he is cliché and simplistic. That is what happens at the end of Snowpiercer and too bad because what comes before it is a masterpiece.
Side note:
One of the great successes of Snowpiercer is to create a world that is real. Like Joon-ho’s hero Terry Gilliam before him (Brazil and 12 Monkeys), Joon-ho crafts a world where the attention to detail from the color pallet to the use of a weighted elevator to lift the member of the rear of the train who documents everything makes the film feel real. In that world, he places the character of Franco the Elder, a seemingly stock villain who is defeated in the tunnel sequence. The time and weight devoted to him both narratively and visually suggests an importance of character. Something that drives him that we will discover. Remember, everything has its place and he must be there for some reason. This film deserves a better character than Franco who still could symbolism as Ben’s claims a force (like Frank Booth from Blue Velvet) but have some suggested mystery and backstory behind him. Instead he becomes another one dimensional villain in the style of Elsyium’s Kruger, or Star Wars Episode One’s Darth Maul. Now this wouldn’t have been a problem in Joon-ho’s great film The Host where he did a masterful job juggling different styles from camp to romance to horror and there, a cliché Hollywood trope seemed in place. Here, his expertly created world and the manner in which he shoots the action scenes suggests a level of realism that what we’re looking at is real, real in the sense that was are meant to accept it as a real world we’re entering. When he does cliché moments like this and not having them tonally balanced but pointless and ridiculously over the top in a cliché way, the curtain drops and I am suddenly reminded I am in a theater. I am not on the train, nor experiencing the moment. The suspense dies. He does a disservice to his audiences especially over something that so easily could have been written out.
