Saturday, July 12, 2014

Movie Review: Snowpiercer



In most cases I don’t go in for the triple AAA Hollywood action movie.  When I go to the movies, while I do like to be distracted, I want it to have some semblance of order and not just be over the top.  When I read about this movie in Entertainment Weekly, they made it sound like it was a new-age action movie, something I’d never seen before.  That wasn’t entirely true, but it wasn’t wrong either.  The movie delivers enough story to make the over-the-top action seem like a second element to the story itself.  There may be SPOILERS below, if you plan on seeing this movie and want to be surprised.

The premise of the movie centres around a train that is travelling around the world, which has turned to ice for reasons that were never established.  Chris Evans plays Curtis, a man who is stuck in the back of the train, what would be considered steerage of the Titanic.  The train is comprised of different sections where people who paid more live in the lap of luxury, and those who don’t, they are relegated to live in poverty.  With the outside world gone, the class system is preserved in this train.  Curtis leads the back of the train forward in an attempt to take the train and no longer be cowed the affluent. 

The story unfolds with a delightful ensemble cast supporting Evans, including Tilda Swinton playing a love-to-hate villain as well as Octavia Spencer as a crazy mother separated for her son.  There was also a father-daughter combo who were playing a very curious role of seemingly addicts, but the addicts were collecting the drugs for use as an explosive as opposed to abusing.  When Evans finally gets to the end of the train, the story twists again, revealing the plot that he was set up to come forward from the beginning and must now decide to inherit the role of the man in the engine room or not.  The movie ends in a chaotic sort of way, perhaps to give us hope that the world hasn’t ended, but it still looks bleak.  A very unusual action adventure that kept me engaged and guessing.

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