Review of Snowpiercer (2013)
Seen in 2016.
This allegory has gaping plot holes. Most fundamentally, no reason is presented for why the train should exist in the first place, and there is similarly no reason why it should remain in such good condition for decades, missing only a few parts despite running continuously on an unmaintained single track under environmental conditions worse than Runaway Train’s Alaskan winter. The reason for treating the train purely as a premise of the narrative is its use as a phallic metaphor for unjust political and religious authority conflated with the mind’s control of the rest of the body, which is worse than the convict’s-life metaphor of the earlier film.
Eating processed bugs is not disgusting when they have kept people alive and shockingly healthy for 18 years. It’s just stupid because a hydroponic vegetarian diet is cheaper, easier and less likely to trigger multiple violent uprisings. Any reform is portrayed as futile, and this is done as if society cannot improve, not with the satirical approach of Flatland (1884). Destruction is conflated with literally lateral thinking. Appropriately, given the stupidity of the script, the opening shots suggest something of chemtrail conspiracy theory alongside a dangerously facile picture of the real dangers of geoengineering. The execution has some texture, but “Runaway” (2009) is a better treatment of the surface motif and Letters from a Dead Man (1986) is a better treatment of apocalyptic hopelessness.
References here: Train to Busan (2016), Okja (2017), Parasite (2019).