Bong: Snowpiercer (2013)

Train travel is such a reliable cipher for cinema that it’s quite disorienting to see a film like Snowpiercer that uses it as a cipher for digital gaming instead. Based on Jacques Lob’s graphic novel, it’s set in a post-apocalyptic future that’s been decimated by a second Ice Age after taking extreme measures to prevent global warming. The only survivors are the inhabitants of the Snowpiercer, a train powered by a perpetual-motion engine and segregated according to strict class principles. That’s something you piece together gradually, though, since the film doesn’t establish so much as assume a state of class warfare, immediately gathering us up into the propulsive, forward momentum of the latest revolutionary movement, headed by Curtis Everett (Chris Evans), who sets out with an army of workers for the front of the train. It’s an extraordinary journey, not least because the closer the workers get to the front of the train, the more oblivious and indifferent the spaces they’re passing through become – it’s clear that the most privileged occupants have absolutely no idea that class warfare is being brutally waged on their behalf, or at best only regard it as a distant, mildly distracting spectacle being staged for their amuseument. That produces an incredible impotence, and makes Evans feel quite incongruous – he is like a cinematic character trying to fight his way out of a gaming universe, mistaking the limited autonomy of a sandbox world for real autonomy, perpetually unable to accept or comprehend his inability to control actions or even garner responses beyond a fixed radius.  In that sense, it’s a bit like how it would feel to play a sandbox game if the limits to your movements and actions were periodically visualised on the screen – for all the variety and expansiveness of the train, it’s really just a series of levels, or strata, just as Bong continually reins character and even charisma back into wherever it happens to emerge from in the train’s tightly controlled hierarchy. And that’s perfect for a film that bristles for some space beyond class, a dystopia that’s desperate for some way out of the mantra of sustainability that sustains the train and everything it stands for. Like the best dystopias, too, it doesn’t answer questions so much as keep them open, as Bong piles every class system known to history into an incredulous, comic pastiche that forces you to ask, time and again, just why this world is so unremittingly ridiculous, and how it might all be done differently.