Snowpiercer, because I just can't stand it

[metaphortunate]

More on Snowpiercer, about which I was saying that it ruined our date night because I talked Mr. E into seeing it and then spent the rest of the night apologizing.

The biggest problem for me is that director Bong Joon-ho says that the whole film is about Curtis’ journey, and Curtis’s journey is so aggressively uninteresting to me that it actually caused me emotional pain every time it was made impossible for me to ignore it. Beautiful snowscapes! Gorgeous art deco train design! Picturesquely Mad Maxian gutters and tatters! Tilda Swinton’s hilariously cringing amoral functionary! Nihilistically hot Song Kang-ho SORRY no more time for any of that it’s time to FOCUS ON MANPAIN. Movie starts, you see the tallest white dude in steerage, he has beautifully lit blue eyes, a slightly shorter white dude looking worshipfully at him and telling him how cool he is, and an aged white dude (John Hurt, thriftily reusing the beard from Only Lovers Left Alive) Obi-Wanning his way through a short speech about how Tall Dude Must Lead. Oh my god. Oh my god, I do not care about this dude’s destiny. I hate him, I hate his destiny, I hate his conflict, such as it is, I hate his supposed character arc, I hate his face. I hate the fact that obviously the movie is about him because OF COURSE IT IS. He’s Captain America, incidentally. Of course he is.

Okay, spoilers now.

Now I’m actually willing to accept the movie on its level of allegory and dream logic. I accepted that when they crossed the Yekaterina Bridge and the steerage and the axe guys stopped fighting in order to sit next to each other and brace for impact like Wile E. and the dog peacefully sharing a lunch break, that’s fine. But I hate that by the fact of that logic, the characters I actually cared about a little, i.e. the parents who lost their kids, and Nam the locksmith and his daughter, and Swinton, all got killed and/or left behind on the journey because the movie is about the stripping away of everything from Captain America so that he can Go Alone To Meet His Destiny which I hate with the fire of a thousand suns.

Speaking of allegory, the other thing the movie is about, sort of, is class, but it’s a weird fucked up class allegory in which the wealth of the ruling class isn’t actually derived from the poor. Like, there’s the bit in the classroom where the rich kid repeats that the steerage people are lazy and don’t work, which sure, yeah, very pointed bit of satire there I’m sure, except that in this allegory it looks like 98% of the steerage people actually DON’T do any work, there’s no implication that they’re servants or anything, they never get out of steerage, they don’t work as guards, they’ve never seen the front of the train - there’s one guy who makes the food for the people in the back, but he’s been taken OUT of the back, so it seems like the people in the front of the train do their own work and the people in the back do their own and what do the people in the front get out of the people in the back anyway? It’s like a class allegory where the poor ARE freeloaders like Romney etc. claim, which is fucked up! Which is sort of subverted at the very end where you see that the engine relies on the labor of a couple of steerage kids, I guess, so I don’t entirely hate that part of the movie.

But it ought to hit you like Omelas, and it really doesn’t, because there’s no emotional sense that the engine is providing life and well-being to people, it’s too mixed up with the way the train is a prison, and also at the point of the steerage kids reveal the movie is busy also revealing that you have been tricked into watching The Matrix 2 again - again! complete with stupid rave! - and this was all planned and Captain America must choose between his corrupt ruling destiny and his pure amputation-related destiny - man, there was a lot of amputation in this movie. And then of course Nam and his daughter blow up the train and destroy humanity. So at least there’s a happy ending, because it turns out the train messages were wrong and the world has recovered enough to support apex predators, viz. the polar bear who is clearly about to tear the last two remaining survivors’ faces off, so don’t even think about pulling any Adam and Eve games, you two. And, I personally am totally willing to accept human extinction as a happy ending? But again with the class allegory, I am uncomfortable with a movie that is a class allegory and portrays “the message from those higher up is that humanity can only survive with a rigid class structure in which everyone stays in their assigned place, and actually that is totally true and the first time anyone successfully messes with it, every human on Earth dies.”

And incidentally I am also not a big fan of the allegory dream logic, because what it means is, you have to take everything at face value, you can't think. You have to just accept that even after 17 years and cannibalism people would be horrified at the idea of eating bugs. Dude, there are plenty of people who eat bugs NOW. 17 years after you think all life on earth has frozen to death, I would expect the cockroaches in steerage to be cherished pets and occasional protein. But no! Apparently this is awful, awful! And you have to accept it because otherwise the message is lost and the movie doesn't make any sense. You have to accept that prison is solitary confinement in a box too small to sit up in and yet people come out of it totally ready to cope with life and adventure and society. Which means you can't think, because none of it makes sense if you think, you just have to accept what the movie tells you, and this movie does NOT have enough internal logic for that and I HATE being told to just turn my brain off. So frustrating. Movie, I tried to like you, because you were my idea! I kept saying "But, allegory! ...:D?" No. It's just dumb.

The opening titles were amazing though. Truly we are living in a golden age of film title sequences.

Comments

[wordweaverlynn]

I'm definitely cheering for the polar bears.

[laurashapiro]

I like reading your reviews of bad things almost as much as I like seeing good things. Thanks for warning us away so eloquently. I am sorry it ruined your evening, though.

[giandujakiss]

At this point I'm bizarrely cheering Snowpiercer negative reviews, because I also did not like it but my tumblr dash thinks it's movie perfection, and I was starting to feel so very alone.

I also had the same reaction to the bugs - like, what the hell did they think they were eating, given the givens? People eat bugs today! It could have been a lot worse!

And the thing with the class message - my problem wasn't that the people in steerage did nothing, it was that no one did anything. Other than the very few service workers we saw, essentially, no one worked. So they were divided into classes for no reason other than the train guy decided they should be. In a capitalist society, there's a justification for class stratification - people work, they get rewarded for their work, and better rewards provide an incentive to work more/innovate more. It may not play out that way in practice but that's the theory. On this train, there was no explanation. No one did any work. And there was no claim that, for example, there were only a few resources and so they had to be allocated - like, it wasn't like "we only have medication for half of you so the other half have to be sick!" It would have been just fine to integrate everyone and give everyone a lower but still decent standard of living. The only reason they didn't was the train guy decreed otherwise. It was meaningless.

[tam_nonlinear]

I still basically liked the movie, after accepting there was no logic, but I also came out with the happy ending message being "humans are just awful. Screwed up the planet, screwed up each other, just a bad deal all around. Stop the train and let the bears have the planet again." It was pretty and darkly funny and cringingly brutal in parts, and I'm glad I saw it, but I'm assuming those kids are doomed even if the bear doesn't eat them.

Either that or somewhere else on the planet there's a couple of bunkers full of sane and decent folks, who maybe had been actually working to reverse the snowpocalypse, who are now saying "Oh good, the crazy train finally derailed."

[skygiants]

hahahahaha yes. Like, I get the point, and I can sort of make the allegory make sense (especially the extremely sledgehammery Omelas bits towards the end. THE ONLY WAY TO FIX THE SYSTEM IS TO BLOW UP THE SYSTEM!) and I'm willing to forgive the movie for focusing too much on Chris Evans given that they blow him up at the end with everyone else and letting the last two Survivors Of Hope be the black kid and the Korean kid, except for the minor unfortunate detail that they're all about to be eaten by the Polar Bear of Hope anyway, but oh well. BUT I FIND IT VERY DIFFICULT NOT TO POKE AT THE ACTUAL LOGIC OF THE TRAIN.

I also really, really want to know where all the steerage classes went. Because they were, hilariously, just GONE. WE NEVER FOUND OUT WHERE. Except that one sushi guy. I guess the disappearance of the middle class was part of the allegory....?

[kore]

I'm willing to forgive the movie for focusing too much on Chris Evans given that they blow him up at the end with everyone else and letting the last two Survivors Of Hope be the black kid and the Korean kid, except for the minor unfortunate detail that they're all about to be eaten by the Polar Bear of Hope

HAAAAAAAAAAH yeah, apparently the director first thought of a deer? (Except how would a deer survive there?) But since the polar bear is the popular symbol of climate change etc., etc. ....

[(Anonymous)]

"BUT I FIND IT VERY DIFFICULT NOT TO POKE AT THE ACTUAL LOGIC OF THE TRAIN." That's a shame because the train actually tightly fits the metaphor that the allegory of the film sets out to address — the industrial world, built upon the expansion of the railways, riding old worn rules about class and economic growth, careening down a path ultimately doomed (peak oil, banking crises, etc.) but no one is willing to change things even though it is bound for collapse — one might even say DERAIL — because of how it continues to benefit those in control even with all of these problems.

(It's definitely interesting to point out in the original story it's adapted from, the Wilford character doesn't ever pretend that the engine is eternal — he's fully aware it will eventually break down.)

I saw this a year late! go me!

[kore]

the point of the steerage kids reveal the movie is busy also revealing that you have been tricked into watching The Matrix 2 again - again! complete with stupid rave! - and this was all planned and Captain America must choose between his corrupt ruling destiny and his pure amputation-related destiny

YES

WTF

WHY WAS IT THE MATRIX 2 ALL OVER AGAIN ONLY WITH BONUS 'HEY THAT GUY WAS IN THE TRUMAN SHOW'

I am uncomfortable with a movie that is a class allegory and portrays “the message from those higher up is that humanity can only survive with a rigid class structure in which everyone stays in their assigned place, and actually that is totally true and the first time anyone successfully messes with it, every human on Earth dies.”

YES, exactly....people kept telling me "It's an allegory, it's about capitalism, it's about totalitarianism, you can't be so literal," but I don't think it works as an allegory, if in no small part because the message seems to be "they blew up their resources because evil classism and now we can go back to nature which is eternal and pure and surviving."

Beautiful snowscapes! Gorgeous art deco train design! Picturesquely Mad Maxian gutters and tatters! Tilda Swinton’s hilariously cringing amoral functionary! Nihilistically hot Song Kang-ho SORRY no more time for any of that

And YES to the actual story being all about the white dudes -- Curtis, Edgar, Gilliam, Wilford, the dude with tattoos, the Terminator dude -- but, how did Nam and his daughter get in those morgue drawers? Where is her mother? How did he come up with the idea for the plan? What does his daughter think of it? Nam knew the leader of the Seven! I WANT TO SEE THAT STORY. Chris Evans horrified at cockroaches (what) and then admitting to baby-eating....not so much. (Man, and Wiki just told me the Inuit Leader of the Seven was his daughter's MOM, that would have been even more epic.)

(Also, Song Kang-ho, holy wow. And Go Ah-sung was just mesmerizing)