Friday, May 9, 2014

Movie Review: Snowpiercer

Know your place. Take your place, be a shoe....

Thank God I got to see this before The Weinstein Co. got their hands on this fantastic film!
It's upsetting to me that the Weinstien company feels American's are too dumb to appreciate/understand this film, and they plan to cut 20 of the 126 mins out of it! Essentially turning Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) into John McClane.
Snowpiercer has an incredible cast including John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Ed Harris and Chris Evans who has really impressed me time and again with his choice of roles from Sunshine, Push, Capt America and now Snowpiercer.
Snowpiercer is anything but an action movie! It deals with some very pertinent subjects such as  Class Warfare/ Eugenics/Gentrification/ Child Labor, Oligarchy's which feels very timely considering the diminishing middle class in our country and the gap between the poor and wealthy which continues to grown ever so silently.
This film essentially has the same exact plot as last years movie Elysium but is much less heavy handed, I appreciated the subtleties within Snowpiercer over the special effects and 'splosions in Elysium, such as the diversity of the rebels that Curtis leads forward, there are old, young, white, black, Asian, men, women, compare that to Elysium where Matt Damon seemed like the only poor white person surrounded Impoverished Spanish and Blacks.
I also found it fascinating how Mason (Tilda Swinton) and the teacher (Alison Pill) explained to Curtis and the students respectively that the train...the machine must keep going or everyone would freeze and die. Could the train represent Capitalism? There is certainly a clear "balance" in capitalism, the producers and consumers, those who create jobs and those who need jobs...there is a harmony when Capitalism works, but what happens when the consumers stop spending for one reason or another? The machine breaks down, which can be seen around the world today.
The one thing that I wished was in the version I saw were sub titles for the conversations between Curtis and Namgoong Minsu (Song Kang ho), especially that lengthy one towards the end.
The revelation at the end by Wilford (Ed Harris) hit me just as hard as Curtis, the truth can be brutally painful at times and what Wilford reveals to Curtis about "balance" and "insurrections/revolutions". Nobody wants to hear they're completely expendable or useless.
This is a profound film that at face value could be seen as an action movie on a train, but look a little closer and this film is a reflection of society, and not the most flattering.
A  











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