Snowpiercer

Like Fritz Lang's similarly grandiose tour de force of set design, Metropolis (1927), Bong Joon Ho's 2014 Snowpiercer is essentially a film about labor relations.  Lang's film concludes with a mass of  workers marching in a triangular formation up the steps of a Gothic cathedral.  At the apex of the triangle, the leader of the workers, a burly hirsute bear of a man, hesitantly approaches his boss, the formidably arrogant Freder, and, then, shakes his hand.  An intertitle informs us that "The Heart must mediate between the Brain and the Hand."  Some such form of mediation is sorely needed between workers and management in Snowpiercer, a dystopian allegory that takes place on a huge train plowing through the interminable ice and glaciers of a ruined planet.  In an attempt to reverse global warming, apparently, scientists went too far, inducing a lethally cold and disastrous ice age.  The last remnants of humanity are gathered together on the train, a kind of ark, that roars across the frozen planet on an endless, futile journey to nowhere.  The train is powered by some kind of mystical energy that, nonetheless, has steam-punk elements -- the engine has chambers full of elaborate gears and pinions, whirling governors, and pipes oozing fumes; implausibly, the huge machine must be maintained by hardworking, scrawny four-year olds:  anyone above the age of the five is too large to creep through the compartments to replace parts that have failed.  (This is one of many allegorical touches in the film, elements that are absurd from the perspective of narrative plausibility, but necessary to the movie's symbolic structure.  Lang managed effects of this sort in his equally symbolic Metropolis, Snowpiercer's most obvious antecedent, by installing hallucinatory visions in his film:  for instance, the image of the machine as Moloch in Lang's epic or the dance of Death in the Cathedral, or the Tower of Babel -- all episodes that are conceived as the product of delirium on the part of his characters.  The Korean director Bong Joon Ho is much less skillful and prosaic:  he doesn't stage his absurdities as prophetic visions; instead, everything in his film is stupidly literal.)  The folks at the rear of the train, a couple hundred grimy-looking proles,are apparently responsible for some kind of industry -- Ho doesn't really explain the economic basis of the train or what the oppressed workers are supposed to be doing, other than reproducing so that their children can be harvested to serve as grease monkeys press-ganged into  the ultimate exercise in dangerous child labor in the engine compartment.  The proles live in a clanking factory, crammed together in narrow metallic corridors, and they are led by an old mutilated gent, Gilliam -- the name is a clue to the Ho's source for his camera-work and set design, the lurid grotesqueries of the British director, Terry Gilliam.  (Gilliam's influence is also a bit malign:  the British director is fond of whimsical upper-class characters, similar to the twits found in Monty Python sketches, and this translates into a number of bizarre personages wandering through Snowpiercer, most notably a fat girl in a yellow frock who measures everything she encounters and an eccentric characterization by Tilda Swinton of an evil factotum of the train's engineer and master, Wilford.   Back in the rear of the train, the character, Gilliam, (played by John Hurt as a compound of Gandalf the Grey and Jimmy Hoffa) encourages his protegees to rebel against their masters and a bloody uprising waged as  a series of ax-battles in narrow corridors ensues.  The combat scenes are brutal and undeniably effective, particularly one fight complicated by long pitch-dark tunnels and the train crashing through cascades frozen to the side of towering, icy mountains although Ho indulges himself in one too many shots of the locomotive's wheels splashing sparks in all directions and about to come off the rails.  The film's first half has little exposition and is mostly devoted to the violent uprising -- this part of the film is lavish with horrors:  various kinds of tortures and humiliations inflicted on the grumbling proles, then, lots of throat-cutting and bashing with axes and the movie's first hours is fun and effective in a Spartacus sort of way.  The revolt of the slaves seems just and their violence righteous and their foes are uniformly despicable.  But as the film progresses, it becomes increasingly turgid and windy -- the picture is front-loaded with violent action so that the narrative exposition, heavy freight indeed, has to catch up with the story.  As a result, the movies slows for speechifying and satire and, becomes, progressively more and more philosophical in a sophomoric way.  The final scenes involving a colloquy between Wilford and the leader of the rebels are impressively operatic, but tedious.  It turns out that that the train's locomotive, a series of orbs and metal rings within rings is something like Dante's unmoved mover, an image for God, and the strangely involuted speeches in the film about the Great Chain of Being and how each social class has its own divinely appointed station, orations that could come from a Shakespeare play like Coriolanus, turn out to be not just comical interjections but, in fact, serious discourse about how society is organized: Bong Joon Ho seems to be saying that the only alternative to a rigidly hierarchical and repressive society is Hobbesian chaos, the war of each against all others -- a theme that also connects this film to the implicitly Fascist imagery of Lang's far greater picture.  Snowpiercer is spectacular in some ways, intelligently made and constructed, and more or less, coherent if implausible.  The acting is grim sword and sandals stuff, sub-Spartacus ranting, but the characters are vividly drawn and the bad guys, at least, have a certain stylish appeal.  Obviously, this film, a Korean - American production, was a prestige vehicle and the picture has A-list stars.  Harvey Weinstein, the American producer, thought the movie was too long and demanded that the Korean director cut out 20 minutes -- the film runs 126 minutes, but like many spectacles of this sort feels much longer.  Ho refused to comply and so Weinstein, in a ferocious gesture that seems to confirm the film's suspicions about the people in charge of our world, buried the movie.  .In a Caligula-like fury, Weinstein destroyed his own movie, killing its publicity and limiting its release to only a few screens -- he, then, sent the picture to the Siberia of direct-to-video within a few weeks of its theatrical release.  It's heresy to say this, but Weinstein was right -- the film isn't twenty minutes too long; it feels at least a half-hour too long.