Movie Review: Snowpiercer (2014)

After much dilly dally, I finally get around to watching Snowpiercer (2014). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620/

Genre: Action, Drama, Sci-fi Rating: 4/5 Watch: visceral visuals, ideology-ideas In a dystopian future, our actions to quell global warming causes the opposite - a deep freeze. Man-kind as we know it survives only on a constantly moving train. Social stratification / classicism is the norm aboard an enclosed environment with limited resources. And as the population grows, space shrinks; revolution forments. The course of this show explains the resulting actions, reactions and ultimate motivation of revolution. The story centers around the current revolution; Curtis, as he fights from the Tail to the Head; the great engine. On the guidance of Gilliam, the figurehead leader of the Tail, Curtis leads the revolt from the Tail and reaches the great Engine - succeeding where no other revolt has. There he meets Wilford, the leader of the Head and architect of the great engine. Anybody who has watched The Matrix will find this theme particularly familiar - meeting the "architect" though in this case it is the "engineer". There are limited resources and an ever growing population. Wilford explains that the revolts play a great purpose - to cull the population within the train and restore balance. Throughout the narrative of this movie, the concept of balance continuously plays in the background. Human beings tipped the balance of nature when our activities resulted in Global Warming. Our actions to correct it created the freezing hell. Human beings within the train must conserve the balance of population against resources and of the resources itself. And here is where the clever head-fake happens - Curtis learns that the head and the tail are in cahoots. Playing the people on the train out to conserve balance. Both Wilford and Gilliam are the knowing antagonists of revolution to control the population on the train. This story is clever because of the seductiveness of argument and ideology. Stories such as "Those who walked away from Omelas" by Ursula LeGuin and Dostoyevsky's "Brothers Karamazov" in particular explore this subject in detail. The story ends with the great uncertainty for the future of man. The train is destroyed as Curtis sacrifices himself to help save a pair of children. The friend who prompted me to watch this movie also gave me a link: http://thekoreanforeigner.blogspot.de/2013/08/the-philsophy-of-snowpiercer.html Suffice to say, this particular reviewer is an Objectivist - the idealogy by Ayn Rand. That's a rather "seductive" ideology that talks big but has few answers while encouraging people to be judgemental, and heroically selfish. When I watched this show, the first thing that pops into mind is ultra-capitalism gone hideously wrong - your class was determined by the ticket you bought. This results in an "autocratic state". There is a leader at the head of the train - the great engine. And there is a leader at the tail of the train - the dispossessed. Class stratification occurs where only a few can enjoy great wealth while a great many must suffer in poverty. I am hesitant to consider this a totalitarian state because in such systems social classes of haves and have-nots are dictated by who sucks up to the great leader. In Snowpiercer, the class system is more arbitrary - people are born rich or poor with little mobility between classes except where skills are useful to the rich. The system is perpetuated by propaganda among the rich class. Also, predatory exploitation occurs only on the poor. This is pretty much the problems that exist in most capitalist societies - the more capitalist leaning, the more extreme the problems. The power structure exists on the ideology of Wilford and the great engine: 1- Ensure the continuation of the great machine - this is the world 2- Preserve Balance of Resources - this is the system that provides 3- Play individuals' selfish self interests against each other - this is the system that sustains - that preserves the balance This is selfishness taken to the extreme by both Wilford and Gilliam - nobody else gets to choose, nobody else gets to sacrifice themselves for others. Everybody is part of a game. And it is easy to understand. The reviewer above kind of misses the point. The reviewer focuses on the fact that two people walk out into the wilderness with only themselves to determine their future. Well, without the sacrifice of a father and the rejection of selfishness those two people would not have had that choice in the first place. Curtis' choice to reject rational self-interest in preserving the status quo was the only way things could change. I'm a psycho. If I were in Wilford's position, I would have done similar things. However, I think that ensuring people understood where they were and a more equitable distribution of resources would have gone a very long way to preserving peace - population control would still be a problem obviously. Additionally, Wilford showed a remarkable lack of imagination. Here is a train that travels across a huge landmass. Could he not have allowed people to establish outposts and worked towards reversing the deep freeze? There are risks with this plan as those outposts would have easily done harm to the train from outside but we're talking about the interest of a species. There are large tracts of civilization with technology and resources that could be scavenged - especially in cities.