Snowpiercer
Ah, the review you have all been waiting for. According to my calendar, I watched the film on Cinco de Mayo (kind of fitting, in a very absurd way) and I feel a little bad for taking almost a month to write the actual review.
In my defense, “Snowpiercer” is the kind of film that needs a strong stomach. It’s a probably a good idea to let the film sink in, or otherwise my entire review would have consisted on describing how much I wanted to puke during the film. I can stomach a lot of things (cockroaches? yeah let me kill that for you) and usually don’t have much trouble with horror films and such, but I can’t handle dead animals on the street and overly bloody war movies. I also skipped through the Red Wedding, even though most killing scenes in Game of Thrones are more comical than disgusting. The fight scenes in “Snowpiercer” go into the same direction of realistic-looking killings, and for the most part I just closed my eyes during them. It’s pretty easy to tell by the sound when it’s a good idea to open your eyes again, and I just saw no reason to put myself through that kind of suffering. I doubt I missed much.
Actually the same applies to the movie. It had so many faults I was wondering whether it was really a Bong Joon-ho movie, the master of subdued drama and dark humor. To me, the film failed on the account of providing either; if anything, things were overly dramatic and the humor was very in-your-face (though I personally enjoyed the silliness of the front train and the absurd cliché-ness of Wilford). Even the plot twists were lame, but the easiest mistake to spot is the one Loris pointed out to me instantly: they failed the number one rule of storytelling, “show, don’t tell”. Towards the end of the film, we got an utterly ridiculous backstory told through Chris Evans’ dreadful sobbing about how tough life was on the train and how they all turned into cannibals. I think I laughed out loud when he said: “I know what people taste like. And I know that babies taste the best.” I don’t even know what to say, I have never seen such trivialization of something that is truly and utterly horrible. It’s terrible, ladies and gentlemen.
The good points of the film? Well, Tilda Swinton is lovely and successfully manages to not look like Tilda Swinton (that’s amazing costuming for you), I was positively surprised at the appearance of Alison Pill (awesome role, really) and Song Kang-ho saves the day. The role of his daughter is pleasantly cute but her clairvoyance is a little ridiculous, while he himself got the best deal out of the entire film. He’s probably the only character who has anything remotely like depth, but don’t expect too much, he’s the clichéd anarcho-genie-type who retained hope while everybody else went crazy. Some of his cynical yet hopeful comments pretty much make up the entirety of worthwhile dialogue in the film.
I got my hands on the comic, but since it’s a French comic I can’t get myself to read it. My brain cannot compute those panels and that French Gossensprache. Even so, the few pages I saw looked quite different and a little confusing, probably because it seems to begin in medias res without much explanation of the background.
Considering that I recently declared Bong Joon-ho to be Korea’s best director, I have to admit that I am bitterly disappointed with this film. Maybe it’s a thing with Asian directors – the older they get and the more fame they have, the more they turn into moneymaking machines.
PS. I absolutely dread English lines in k-pop songs, not because they are pointless but because when I am a writing a blog posting, I need songs in a language I completely don’t understand. (Bestie’s Love Options is quite awesome on that front.)