Snowpiercer Review: Or, "Stop the Hype Train, I Want to Get Off"

*This is by far my lengthiest written review I've ever done. Short Version: Snowpiercer has some isolated highlights, but the framework is corroded to the point that, once the elements that make it work are removed, the entire film eventually comes crashing down.*

There was a fleeting span of time during which I was really enjoying Snowpiercer. During the second act, there comes great sequence after great sequence, starting with one involving a room full of masked mooks armed with only axes and night vision goggles that consistently surprises and excites, and ending with an insanely surreal scene in which Alison Pill (yes, Kim Pine) plays a deranged pregnant preschool teacher hammering propaganda into her students' heads through song.

Then it all goes downhill.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have gotten my hopes up. The signs were clear early in the film that the best parts of Snowpiercer are those just off to the side rather than those at the forefront. Chris Evans, more than able to play a human, invigorating lead (see: the Captain America movies), is basically a blank slate in this. Compared to the performances from pretty much every other actor in this movie, you'd be surprised to learn that his role isn't played by a half-trying Lucas Lee. The few subplots never seem to wholly intersect, each one stopping the main plot dead when they're brought up.

The backstory is that, due to global warming, a chemical called CW-7 is spread throughout the atmosphere. However, this only ends up screwing the world over by freezing the planet and driving humanity to near-extinction. The remaining survivors all congregate onto a "cruise train" built by an entrepreneur who lives in its engine room that travels the world. But all of this is pretty much just a set-up for an economic metaphor, as those in more destitute conditions live in the back and are unjustly treated while those towards the front live in the lap of luxury. Despite some really gorgeous set design towards the back end of the film, the sociological angle here is only slightly more subtle than it was in last year's Elysium.

Yet, I feverishly attempted clutching onto the small glimmers of promise the movie held. Tilda Swinton steals the entire film with a scenery chewing villain role based around a crazy haircut, dentures, and inappropriately placed malapropisms. Whenever she's on screen, the movie's elevated into a dementedly fun ride that leaves you clinging onto her every word and action.

The face of true evil, ladies and gentlemen.

So, it makes sense that the second act works the best since she's pretty much present throughout most of it. Once that's no longer the case, it symbolically signals the slow death of the film in the coming scenes.

Almost every other supporting character is compelling to some extent as well. Song Kang-Ho and Ko Ah-Sung play a father-daughter pair of technicians who also happen to be huge drug addicts. Their relationship and occasional comic relief are the closest thing to actual humanity this film has to offer. The aforementioned Alison Pill one-scene-wonder is either a thing of uncharacteristic cheesiness or brilliant madness (I'm going to go with the latter, since it was by far the most fun moment in the film, intentional or otherwise). Ed Harris gets to schmooze it up in luxury towards the end. Even John Hurt works well despite limited screentime.

But this doesn't end up amounting to much when the film's relentlessly violent streak ends up cutting out the sole strengths it has one by one. As the number of living characters slowly dwindles, it becomes increasingly clear that, by the end, we'll be stuck with Chris Evans in bland stoicism mode. It doesn't help that he's constantly got the patented Chris Evans Intense Stare of Stoic Intensity™.

Pictured: Emotion

The film's eventual explanation of why he's always got the look of a recently neutered pit bull is quite possibly the single most insulting scene in this thing. What's supposed to be the emotional core of the film that gives background to Evans's character ends up becoming an unhealthily long exposition dump that so quickly veers into pitch black territory that had never been encroached that quickly becomes unintentionally humorous. The sudden shift is so perplexingly phrased and delivered in such a maudlin manner that it causes any impact it has on our perception of Evans's character to immediately become flattened into insignificance. This single moment alone is a deadening affair on the entire film's momentum, not helped in the least by the fact that Evans's monologue drags on interminably and keeps obscenely adding onto his character's tragedy with each sentence that leaves his mouth.

Ultimately, the main problem with Snowpiercer is that any goodwill towards the film is canceled out by a larger element in the same field that causes the entire thing to suffer. All of the supporting cast is more than noteworthy, but it eventually just comes down to Chris Evans's comparatively blank cipher. The cinematography occasionally stuns, but it becomes insignificant next to shaky camera movement during action scenes that cause even the act of shivving the keys out of an extremely tall guard's chest to get lost in incomprehensibility. There's a continual sense of curiosity in seeing what the next room of the train will look like, but, to get there, you have to endure the exposition-laden script that sometimes even contradicts itself (i.e. someone telling Evans's character that he's the first person to walk the entire distance of the train when at least one other person in the film does just that before him). The second act actually made me excited to see how the film would conclude, only for the movie to stumble over itself in the third act, render a neglected subplot about kidnapped children irrelevant, and end with a stunningly dumb act of literal self-immolation followed by a note of implied optimism that's supposed to tie up the loose end that is the film's world but only prominently displays a poorly rendered CG polar bear.

That said, I would definitely cosplay as Tilda Swinton's character at next year's New York Comic-Con.