A year later "Snowpiercer" is still a movie to watch
/September is a horrible time for new movies. I love to watch movies, but the theaters have nothing good to offer. Channel surfing is the best way to find anything worth watching.
Last night as I was channel searching at 10pm, I came across the movie "Snowpiercer". I saw this movie in the theaters and I loved it, but I also forgot about it. I own it on DVD as well, but I leant it to a friend, and I still don't have it back. I'm here to tell you today that, holy shit, this movie is still totally awesome! First of all, the cast is incredible. You have stars like Chris Evans, Jamie Bell, Tilda Swinton, Octavia Spencer, John Hurt and Ed Harris just to name a few. The set and art direction to this movie is beautiful. The movie takes place in one area, the train, but the train has many different parts. There's the back, aka the poor people, there's sleeping cars, there's a garden, an aquarium and a spa. That's just a quarter of the train. As you get to the higher class people, there's a school, sushi bar, fancy dressed people in one random car, a night club and then the engine. All these cars on the train are beautifully and meticulously designed. For example, the garden looks like a real life garden. I wouldn't be able to tell you if it was on a train or if it was on ground. The nightclub looks like my nightmare of a nightclub. I don't frequent places like that, but the few I've been to are recreated in "Snowpiercer" to haunting perfection. The engine is enormous and beautiful.
The fighting and combat scenes are like watching a bloody ballet. There's one fight scene in particular, where the train's soldiers each gut a fish, presumably to show the passengers that blood will be spilled, and it's awesome. They fight each other with hatchets also. You can hear each plunge into a victim's chest, head, arm and leg. It's brutal, but awesome. When they reach a tunnel, the soldiers turn on night vision and they film the rest of the fight scene from the view of the soldiers. It's really, really cool. Inventive too.
The writer and director, Joon-ho Bong, is very talented and clearly has his own vision for movies. He's only done 13 movies, with "Snowpiercer" being his first, mostly English speaking movie. But, what other people may know him for is the terrifying Japanese horror film, "The Host". That movie is very scary.
Chris Evans, who is great in this movie, gives one of the most heartbreaking yet stomach turning monologues I've ever heard in a movie. I'm not going to spoil it because you need to hear it to believe it. It's so sad and extremely upsetting. When Evans gets to the engine, the back and forth between him and the trains inventor, Wilford(played by Ed Harris) is awesome. You get the viewpoint from the lower and upper class. It's really good, really interesting writing. I cannot recommend this movie enough. It's so great and so much better than crap like the new Transporter movie, or that Agent 47 movie. Hell, I think "Snowpiercer" is better than Chris Evans past two movies, "The Avengers" movies. And, I love "The Avengers" movies. But, if you want to see something super interesting and innovative, watch "Snowpierecer". It also has fighting and explosions and all the stuff you want in a popcorn movie, but "Snowpiercer" has the writing and directing of a small budget independent movie. This movie is incredible and comes highly recommended from me.
Watch it and enjoy.
Ty
Ty is the Pop Culture editor for SeedSing and co host of the X Millennial Man podcast. With the dreadful movie period coming up he is looking for other great movies to watch from the last few years. Follow Ty on twitter @tykulik.