2014 was the year of our planetary catastrophe. In a failed quest to slow global warming, we accidentally brought on a winter apocalypse: all life was extinguished and the whole of the earth covered in marrow-chilling ice. The survivors board the Snowpiercer, a train with a perpetual-motion engine that hurtles along for an icy eternity and protects its passengers from the frozen fate of the arctic wasteland outside. But the train is a microcosm of unequal social relations. Privilege is jaggedly distributed along its length, from engine to caboose. Nearer the front, the 1% live in conditions of senseless luxury, and at the back, we find the gloomy living quarters of the impoverished, where everyone is dressed in miner couture and eat protein bars made of pulverised roaches.
Snowpiercer returns to the realms of sci-fi with a forceful allegory about capitalist disequilibrium and the revolutionary energies of the dispossessed. In this move alone – and this to say nothing yet of its crunchy pacing and arresting visual sense – the film is such a refreshing glimpse of originality that it reminds you just how banal mainstream American sci-fi has become. Films like Elysium and Oblivion wilt in the presence of such imagination. We follow the adventures of Curtis Everett (Chris Evans, his Captain America face shrouded with beard) who, together with a truly rag-tag group of fellow adventurers (a drug-addicted security specialist, a mischievous right-hand man), decide to fight off the fascist patrols and push their way to the front of the train.
In the train, everyone lives under the spell of a political mythology spouted by Wilford, the supreme architect. They become helplessly pacified under such phrases as “the eternal order” (each has his pre-defined place in society) and the “sacred engine” (be grateful, if not for the sanctuary of this train you would be another lifeless snowman). Tilda Swinton plays the authoritarian Mason, with grandmotherly glasses and a mouth of terrifying teeth. Periodically she assembles before the masses, surrounded by her rifle-slinging forces, and shrieks at them in a Yorkshire accent. When she senses the coming restlessness of the end carriage, she tells them that they “suffer from the misplaced optimism of the doomed.”
With a splendid videogame momentum, the revolutionaries charge through the gauntlet to see how the others are living. In one section of the train, they face off against leather-clad S&M-style butchers. They swing their axes in the claustrophobic confines of the room – the carnage is spectacular, and a sense of noble sacrifice enfolded in each life surrendered to the greater cause. The passage through the train is one of discovery. The rebels are slowly piercing through the layers of mystification that they have been made to dumbly exist through.
Snowpiercer ends up deliriously parodying the excesses of the 21stcentury. We pass through the education carriages, where young children are taught to sing the magnificent glories of Wilford, and the drugged-out nightclub sectors where revellers delight themselves into Caligulan stupor. Each scene seems to reflect some troubled aspect of our world, making the monstrousness visible on the surface. Aside from its intelligence, the film thrills as an action piece. Surround sound is used excellently, with a murmur of peripheral voices humming at the edges of your ear. The violence is choreographed with mortality-dispatching glee (the film-makers share George R. R. Martin’s relish for summarily killing off great characters). And, bravely, the ending is one of guarded hope, more threatening than soothing.
At last, we have a much-craved injection of adventurous spirit into this comatose genre, a film that not only uses science fiction to offer an interrogative angle on humanity, but arranges all the most evocative powers of cinema into a kinetic thrill-ride. This is among the most impressive releases of the year.