I can suspend my disbelief for some of the strangest things.  Zombies.  A mineral from space growing out of control and threatening to destroy the world.  Tom Cruise as a human being with actual feelings.  But I had the hardest time accepting the central conceit of 2013’s Snowpiercer.

You see, the entirety of the picture takes place on a train.  Not even Atlas Shrugged was so obsessed with this form of transportation.  The one here never stops running on a track which goes around a frozen, post-apocalyptic world. On board are the last humans, as well as everything necessary to sustain them.  It never even has to stop for fuel, because it has a perpetual energy engine.  The last of those was the easiest element for me to believe, as that is a typical sci-fi thing, physics be damned. 

Much harder for me to believe was that train track.  We will see in a video how the track goes across the oceans, which it would have to, as it truly spans the world.  I very much doubted it would ever be possible to do this.  But what nagged me the most throughout the runtime was nobody maintaining these tracks.  I just happened to have watched Beyond the Time Barrier with the commentary track recently, where Tom Weaver speaks of the impossibility of a plane landing on a runway a couple of decades after maintenance of it ceased.  Just imagine the kind of issues that might happen to a train track, never mind the parts of it spanning the ocean.

That would be true even though the train has only been doing this circumnavigation for 17 years.  We learn this from Chris Evans, who is one of the passengers in the last car, the one where the undesirables are kept.  Much like how the first-class passengers on a flight are in the front of the plane, the hierarchy here has inventor and leader Ed Harris alone in the engine, while each successive car behind it has a lower class than the one before.

The association with car and caste must not be that rigid, because most of the compartments seem to be dedicated to a particular function which serves the greater community.  One is dedicated to a giant aquarium, where sushi is served from it just two days a year, in order to maintain the balance of sea creatures.  How fortunate our heroes just happen to be there on one of those days. 

This information is conveyed by Tilda Swinton to a ragtag group from the last compartment who have taken her hostage in their attempt to get to the front of the train.  They seek a confrontation with the mysterious “Wilford” who is in the engine and is regarded as nothing less than a God by the more fortunate.  It is a missed opportunity Swinton’s character isn’t named Tetragrammaton, as she is then the voice of God, being the one who delivers orders from him.   

When we first see her, she is conveying judgment upon Ewen Bremner, one of two people who was forced to surrender a child to a mysterious woman whose sole criteria in the selection process seems to be height.  The repercussions Bremner’s minor act of defiance in response to losing his son will be having his right arm shoved out a porthole for seven minutes.  This actor brings the same kind of odd energy and wonderment he exhibited in Trainspotting, as he seems to be more astonished by what is happening than anything.  It is a moment akin to a cartoon character stewing in a pot and saying whatever is cooking smells delicious. Seven minutes is long enough for the arm to freeze solidly enough that a guard can then smash it to pieces with a sledgehammer as if it is was made of marble.

Still, this isn’t the spark that incites a revolution.  Evans is waiting to act until he gets the right message from an unknown contact who hides single-word messages in the occasional “protein block” which is the only food provided to those in the last car.  These things are disgusting in apperance–gelatinous bricks of a deep purple hue.  Odd, but I don’t recall a single person commenting on the flavor.  Nor is there speculation as to the nature of that protein, though I doubt there is a viewer who doesn’t wonder.  When we finally see the source is a vast number of ground-up insects, a couple of characters blanche.  I know I wouldn’t be happy to discover this, though my mind thought of many more things that could be worse.  Also, if all life is dead on the planet, where do the insects come from?

I think it is interesting that the impetus for making a break is a comment Evans overhears which could be interpreted as the guards having run out of bullets.  When he takes a risk and discovers this is true, mayhem breaks out, Swinton is taken hostage, and the group works their way up the train.

Necessary for their progress is Song Kang-ho, who has one of the meatiest roles in the picture, as the only person who knows how to hack the system to open each additional door they face.  He will only do this work for Kronole, a drug made from industrial waste, one block for each door he opens.  Evans claims this is pure and uncut but, given it is made from industrial waste, what could be even more disposable than that which could possibly be used in cut Kronole? 

Kang-ho is insistent Ko Ah-sung accompany them, and her unusual trait is she can perceive what is behind the door, the only person with a supernatural ability here and something I was frustrated to find unexamined.  Alas, she can’t see until it is too late a car full of angry, stocking-masked men all wielding axes.  There will be several interesting developments in that scene which, unlike her, I could not foresee at all. It is no surprise what happens in that care is very violent, and this is violent movie, overall. 

The word manages to continue to work their way up the metaphor…I mean, the train.  Each car they enter holds a new surprise, such as one that is a schoolroom.  Swinton tries to pass off these strange visitors as a rare opportunity for these children to see real people from the last compartment.  The most annoying of these privileged children is a blond girl who says, “I heard all tail sectioners and lazy and sit around all day in their own shit.”  I’m sure it isn’t a coincidence I heard similar sentiments conveyed by many people over the years about people who are on welfare or are homeless.  My single most favorite moment is when hard-boiled eggs are provided as a treat and Octavia Spencer, one of those tail sectioners, cracks hers open on the head of that girl as she passes by.

That girl’s line is typical of the dialogue, where almost every line mirrors a perception in the today’s world of the haves as regards the have-nots and vice-versa.  In response to a dig at the lowest caste, there’s this bon mot: “People in the best place always say that about people in the worst place.”  Swinton has a great deal to say about the prescribed order of things which, of course, benefits her and her kind the most: “All things flow from the sacred engine, in their particular, pre-ordained position.  I belong in the front, you belong in the tail.” 

I like Snowpiercer enough that I could probably watch it at any time and enjoy it.  But I will only ever like it, at best, as I am kept a frozen-arm’s length from it at all times because of its ridiculous premise.  Still, it has its heart in the right place and I can appreciate the messages in it, even if they have the subtlety of a sledgehammer on an arm that is frozen solid.

And I have a final metaphor of my own.  I found it interesting the cause of the world freezing over was an attempted course correction to global warming by introducing an agent into the atmosphere to block the sun’s rays.  I thought it was interesting that climate change, which is caused by human activity, could be inverted into an even worse situation by the human attempt to reverse it.  As the saying goes, the road to Hell is paved in good intentions.  But one can step off a road or turn around.  This time, good intentions permanently put the world on a track, and everybody knows you can’t steer a train.

Dir: Bong Joon Ho

Starring Chris Evans, Jamie Bell, Tilda Swinton

Watched on blu-ray