Critics reviews

Bong's point is that the end of capitalism would not be possible without considerable violence on both sides. We see this also in the anti-capitalist films of the Soviet master Sergei Eisenstein, who also depicted scenes of violent upheaval and brutal repression in "Battleship Potemkin" and "Strike" (both 1925). The end of capitalism, it seems, would be tantamount to the end of the world.

Bong seems to understand something many others don't, both about broad entertainment and the state of successful political action. Big action demands broad strokes; nuances emerge later. In fact, this is to a large degree the political subtext of Snowpiercer itself... Moving from car to car is a vulgar-Marxist revolt organized like a videogame, easy to understand and equally easy to dismiss.

We think we know what to expect from action scenes, just as we think we know what to expect from post-apocalyptic movies and tales of revolution. Again and again, Snowpiercer plays against the expectations it sets up. Up through its final moments, this is a film that is thrillingly, unnervingly unpredictable.

Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer made for a perfect post-apocalyptic straddling of the two program strands and was highly entertaining to boot... [It] holds together marvellously, notwithstanding the heterogeneity of its elements.

Watching Snowpiercer one cannot help but recall Marx's italicized comment in The Class Struggles in France that "revolutions are the locomotives of history." But a metaphor can only take you so far. What happens when the locomotive is trapped in an endless circle like a lab rat on a treadmill or, one of the many things that happens as events reach their tumultuous climax, the train runs off the rails?

Aside from Kim Hye-ja's dominating turn in Mother, the star of Bong's movies has usually been Bong himself. (This runs in his favor in Snowpiercer as his oddly cobbled together international cast performs unevenly and occasionally at odds from each other.) Though, what's most remarkable about Snowpiercer is less his notable skill at managing mise-en-scène when the fighting begins than his delirious visions of the train's different environments that we see in between bouts of carnage.

The film's flamboyant internationalism, and the fact that Bong has attempted to cram so much imaginative richness into a relatively small package (this is only a 125-minute film, pretty concise in comparison to the excessive Hollywood tent-pole running times we've become used to), all this is part and parcel of the film's ambition. For all its weight and seemingly cumbersome monumentalism, Snowpiercer is actually as streamlined and efficient as the train itself.

...It's what Bong does with that parable that makes the relentless, politically provocative and visually spectacular "Snowpiercer" the best action film of 2014, and probably the best film, period. This is a gripping and beautifully integrated adventure...

It plays like a cross between a Terry Gilliam movie and a BioShock game; the latter referent becomes substantially more pronounced once the characters arrive at the forward cars and the movie turns into a series of warped environments that have to be crossed entrance-to-exit, ending with the personal chambers of an enigmatic ruler who rejiggers the narrative into a commentary on itself.

It's this perceived predictability that becomes the movie's greatest strength. Watching Snowpiercer is like having the crap beaten out of you by a judo master: the weight of your own expectations keep dumping you on the floor. The predictable sci-fi blockbuster plot points keep getting overturned in ways both large and small.

...Snowpiercer is a headlong rush into conceptual lunacy—but you'll love it anyway. Silly doesn't even begin to describe a perpetually cruising luxury rail, teetering around high-altitude curves and pounding through the ice of a dead world. Hollywood rarely goes quite this nuts, and the foreign-made production, helmed by South Korea's Bong Joon-ho (The Host), gets at a kind of daring, giddy excitement that plays like something our movies have lost.

The film has enough thematic resonance for three George A. Romero movies, but Romero, despite his reputation as a hippy purveyor of social-protest horror films, played fair: He allowed his conservative bad guys to make occasional sense, and his liberal heroes to succumb to periodic foolishness. Snowpiercer preaches resolutely to the choir, and cinephiles in sync with the film's politics may still blanch at how snugly their interests are courted.