Review of Snowpiercer (2013) by Demorase — 31 Jul 2014

Snowpiercer is a very pretentious and dumb movie trying to pass itself for social commentary on class warfare but utterly fails at it.

What the writers and director forgot when making the movie is that at its core class warfare is about resources: you got a small minority controlling most of the resources and a huge majority fighting for the scraps. It's a powerful topic because it's as old as humanity and echoes to one of our core flaws as human beings: greed.

But this whole concept goes out the window when there isn't any resource left to fight over anyway. Indeed the movie is about a bunch of people living in a small train in a post-apocalyptic world where there's nothing else left in the world! So what exactly is the point of having a bunch of people in that train starving to death for no reason when:

A) they have enough food for everyone. It's clearly shown when you see how well the other passengers are living.

B) those people aren't even working for the leisure of the "upper class", they aren't producing anything or working, they're literally just there to starve for no reason, simply as a plot device.

C) they all live in a freaking small train, they're all miserable anyway. There's no "good life" to be had at the expense of others, unlike in the real world.

The movie doesn't provide any answer, it's all form over substance, pure shock value with no understanding of the underlying issues that create those very real problems.

But even with that aside it's just an all-around bad movie in general, with next to no character development, bad pacing, bad dialog. The stupidity of the whole story is what pushes it into unbearable territory. A shame because Chris Evans does give a very good performance all throughout.