Fight your way to the front Snowpiercer is a futuristic science fiction thriller film based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette. The film is directed by Bong Joon-ho and it stars Chris Evans, Song Kang-ho and Tilda Swinton. The story takes place on a train travelling around the world populated by the last part of humanity lives because of an ice age caused by a failed experiment to stop global warming . Snowpiercer was released on the 29th of July 2013 on the Times Square of Seoul, South Korea. The protagonist is Curtis Everett and the main antagonists are Minister Wilford and Minister Mason.
By looking at the introduction of the film on Netflix I thought it would be boring but the train on the cover and the title made me feel curious to watch the film. The beginning of the film really impressed me because it showed the harsh reality of the poverty that was present in the tail of the train which was showed by a dark setting and sad facial expressions. All the sections of the train, a total of sixty, had a different impact on me because the sections differed much.
The scene I will be describing begins with a box being opened. The scene takes place in the tail of the train where the setting is dark and sad. You hear a sad dramatic sound. The box contains a scissor, a clock and some other tools. Secondly a man his clothes are cut off his romp, his face and body have wounds. A certain liquid is spread over one of his arms by a man in a suit while one of the officers opens a book. The book shows a map of where the train goes and they say that they need only seven minutes on that latitude. Thereafter another man in suit hangs a clock onto the man and they place an arm cuff on his arm. During this process you can hear the train moving and making weird sounds, it is probably making a turn, and you hear the sound of the ticking clock. Also you see the doors of the next cars moving horizontally which confirms my previous assumption. They release a lit of a hole in the train with the name of Wilson on it, you start to hear the wind and they put the arm through the hole. You see snowflakes being blown into the train because the train tends to drive fast. The man looks extremely scared and he screams loudly. The arm cuff exactly fits into the hole and the sound of wind is stopped. The man's facial expression changes into relieved. Then the next scene starts.
The sound in this scene really grabs your attention because of the feeling it gives you. It gives you the feeling that something bad is happening but you do not yet know what. Each cut showing a handling or an object makes more clear about the happening. With the spreading of the liquid you know it has to do with the arm but what is going to happen with the arm is not clear yet. Thereafter the information the officer gives makes you assume it has something to do with temperature and when the lit is opened and the arm cuff is put on it is clear. The man's arm is going to be frozen by the air outside. The scene is filmed from the perspective of the people who have to watch the man being punished and sometimes the camera zooms in on the man or a certain object. The zoom-ins were used to give you one by one clue of what was going to happen. The camera itself does not move.
There are several hidden messages this film has. According to me one of theme is the cruelty of dictatorship. The scene described in the previous paragraphs is clear evidence to this theme. The man being punished shows the cruelty of, in this case, Mr. Wilson and his assistant Minister Mason. Behind the story this film is, when you think about it, about the power of nature, the struggle between order and chaos , propaganda and it clearly criticizes the system of social classes. I think this story is made to make clear that we worry too much about global warming by showing an extremely bad effect of an experiment to stop global warming. Therefore I think the maker of the story tries to tell us we have to leave nature alone. I also think the director made this film to protest against dictatorship and discrimination. He does this by showing the film from the perspective of the poor people. In this way the dictator, Mr. Wilson, seems to be the bad guy and it looks like the poor people are being discriminated but the reasons for Mr. Wilson to do the things the way he does are not shown. The last reason why the director made this film, according to me, is to give people hope. He does this by the sentence on the cover: "Fight your way to the front". No matter how bad your situation is the maker of the story tells you that you can get out of it. I assume the maker of the story has a negative view of the world because all the reasons I could come up with to make this film were to criticize the world as it is right now and give people hope.
This film is made in before 2014 when global warming was a really important issue(and still is). For that reason this film really grabs people's attention. In an interview with IndieWire Bong Joon-Ho tells that he wanted to make a film out of this novel because he was intrigued by the setting: a train, split into social classes, with each car representing something new and unique. In an interview with Collider Bong says that he also liked that he could make a film where the audience could stay with the protagonist and they have to experience the exact same thing. I am surprised by this because I thought he would rather have made the film because of the story instead of the setting. I think that this is an easy film to understand because you can interpret the story in so many ways.
Throughout the process of making this review my thoughts changed. First my thoughts and my first impressions were focussed on the underlying messages of this movie but now the visual aspect and the setting really impresses me. The change of my thoughts is due to the interview of Bong Joon-Ho with Collider because it became more clear what the directors point of view is and his view made sense to me. Therefore, if I would watch this film again I would probably be more amazed by the visual effects of this film instead of the story. I think this film might come back to me when I see an article about experiments to stop global warming. I think I learned a lesson from this film but I do not think it is a positive one because it is that violence makes your path to success easier. I would definitely recommend this film because it has amazing visual performance and the story really grabs your attention. Actually I did already recommend this film to some people.