Murder on the Dystopian Express
I survived season 4 of “Snowpiercer”
For those unaware of Snowpiercer, here’s my spoiler free review of the 2013 film (originally penned and published on 31st July 2022) as a way to ease your way into my rambling musings on season four that follow it:
I’ve lead a somewhat circuitous route to this, the latest of my spoiler free ramblings on what are never really film reviews at all but mere human observations. I’ve watched and enjoyed the spin-off streaming television series and with the reservations and judgements that coalesce here with the original Bong Joon Ho directed film of 2013. I also liked but didn’t love the director’s fifth cinematic film release Okja in 2017 but adored his follow up, Parasite, two years later. I remember seeing this film on opening day at my local cinema and being repulsed and shocked at a marvellous turning of the tables on the audience akin to the films of Jordan Peele. I have long described Peele’s films (as I eagerly await the release of his latest, Nope, in August) as “horribly brilliant”. Get Out and Us are indeed horribly brilliant as they both point the camera inward at us, the audience, to prompt our reactions to a world around us and a world of recent living memory. Can we stomach the realisations being posited by the director? Can we see the parasites living among us? Can we see the four decades old degradation of a societal edifice that is crumbling around us right now? Dare we even see it?
All of these films are horribly brilliant and so is Snowpiercer. Not as good as the three long television seasons allow for in the spin-off but continuing on a theme, I find the spin-off to be horribly brilliant too, but in a more darkly and dystopian way, and here’s the rub: I see the parallels with a real world being created in front of our disbelieving eyes and like the infamous train of this film, it can’t or more worryingly wont, stop.
It’s just a film I hear you scream, but even on the flimsy surface there is a real mirror to a world that has regressed dramatically and irrevocably in just four decades since the 1980’s. The Snowpiercer train and its “Sacred Engine” is a “rattling Ark” and the last of humanity clinging onto the hope that this speeding ark will both keep them safe as well as safeguarding them from a world plunged into a premature ice age in order to prevent a devastating heating of the planet. It’s an entire world within a long rattling train, from the opulence of first class and a school, hairdressers, nightclub and medical facilities all supported by a sauna, fitness and the availability of frozen fresh food. This world is brightly lit, colourful and without seemingly a care in a dying world, but just a few carriages along from this end of the world utopia is the “Tail” full of stowaways who scrambled their way on board the perpetually moving train in sheer desperation at the life ending alternative. This end of the train is dark, dank, grimy and blackly dirty and whereas passengers mere carriages away are fine dining, the inhabitants of the train’s tail have to make do with a disgusting jelly like substance that is all too prevalent in today’s Media news, as well as a series of stories that are headline news around the world rather than hilarious spoof articles from satirical magazines such as The Onion.
Whether it’s the film or the streaming series, my immediate question is if the world is ending or near extinction and your only hope is a constantly moving train and a Noah’s Ark of hope that one day the earth will be habitable again, why is there such a dystopian class war and why is it so abhorrent? These are rhetorical and existential questions and so is questioning why the train needs such heavily armed guards? Why is their policing of the desperate and most in need so bloodily brutal? Why is one train carriage so seemingly oblivious to what is going on mere feet away from them? “Control the engine and you control the world” and your train population’s pre-ordained position or “order” is under your control.
Then you have a mystical benefactor figure who’s often heard but never seen. A godlike figure whose pronouncements are relayed by his very own Chief of Staff type figure (brilliantly portrayed in both film and television series alike) a little off kilter, incredibly dedicated and ostensible cult like quasi leader. Don’t believe the “misplaced optimism of doom” and remember “The Revolt of the 7” are dire warnings meted out to the cold, hungry and desperate members of a dying society that’s being essentially left to die. A black market in drugs, a revolutionary leader, a weakened populace just glad to be safe from the ravages of an instant death outside, families clinging to each other in desperation and simply accepting their lot in life now.
Order is now easy to maintain.
Snowpiercer is indeed horribly brilliant with the only major variation from the television series being the early demise of key central characters. Class struggle. The reimaging of a society. Allocation of resources. Fear. Propaganda. Order. A monied elite. A desperate populace fed on, well, you’ll find out! Any of this sound familiar?
They used to call this “predictive programming” back in the day when so called “conspiracy theories” weren’t as cool and hip as they are today. Replace the train with a “Smart City” retain the goon like soldiers to retain your order and replace food with the jelly, and we’re only scratching the surface of a technocratic and technetronic project that’s been in the works since before I was born. Anyway, it’s just a film.
Just don’t eat the jelly!
The people offering it to you certainly wouldn’t.
So it was that on a somewhat cold and forever raining Monday 23rd September 2024 that my incredibly excited son exclaimed that we finally had a window for all 7+ hours of season 4 of Snowpiercer, and from a late breakfast through to an early tea many hours later we jumped aboard the perpetually moving Noah’s ark of a train that more often than not wasn’t moving at all. Or maybe it was? You see, I’d only seen the first 2 seasons and left the inhabitants of the train trying to join with another constantly moving beast around the world and there were surprise guests and daughters surfacing as the trains were linked together amid raging battles and the loss and regaining of control of a train (or was this now trains, plural?) but certainly control of the “sacred engine” surrounded in high end opulence whilst the unwanted and unwashed of society struggled to stay alive in the dark black mass of the mechanical “tail” and although bleak and desperate, preferable to the instant death of the freezing winter the outside world was gripped in.
But season 4 commences in a place called “New Eden” and I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to the train and why are the inhabitants now free to live outside and especially away from the train that was their life raft and cocoon from a dying world that was now showing signs of life? What had I missed? The answer of course was season 3 and again I couldn’t help but wonder (and pick holes) in a plot that was forever throwing us back and forth on a timeline that only vaguely held together and where was Sean Bean, the Lord and Master of his own train? Then we had lots of Sean Bean, lots and lots of Sean Bean, before no more Sean Bean (eliciting the response of “Oh fucking finally!” from my beautiful son) and all I kept thinking was considering the world was ending who built this endless track around the world or indeed the huge sub-stations that seemed to crop up throughout this season and why are there vast armies of perfectly kitted out soldiers, everywhere, and always acting as though they’ve just stepped off the set of an Austin Powers movie and last of all, why is the bad guy and the reason why the world is in the throes of an unspeakable world ending freezing winter not Bill Gates but the sleazy Sean Penn lawyer character from Carlito’s Way?
Turning to my son mid-way through season 4 I confessed to being more than a little confused and seeing echoes of a character in a film from 1993 and suddenly I was telling him that we HAVE to watch Carlito’s Way together if only for the soul destroying ending to a magnificent film I know he’ll enjoy and then Sean Bean came and went and I’m wondering who created these magnificent, fully catered for building complexes at the end of the world and why were so many soldiers marching around (and what did they do and where did they go on their time off — presumably back to starring in Austin Powers films?) and then it struck me that my son had been taking notes on each and every chapter and when asked why, he said:
“I want to present these to Mum later so she doesn’t feel left out”.
And that kind of makes the heart sing, doesn’t it?
Thanks for reading. For more harebrained and half baked ideas that kind of make sense if you’ve drunk enough tea in the morning, please see volume three of my rambling musings here. Look good all wrapped up and beneath a loved one’s tree this Christmas wouldn’t it? Little bow in the corner, that kind of thing. I’ll leave the wrapping decisions to you. OK?
Peace.
"Tales I Tell Myself" - link to Amazon
Thanks for reading. I hope this message in a bottle in The Matrix finds you well, prospering, and the right way up in an upside down world.