The superhero franchise star shows off his dramatic chops in a dystopian story about humanity’s desperate attempts to survive a sudden ice age.
Jamie Bell, Chris Evans, and company prepare to fight their way forward in Snowpiercer.
Radius/Weinstein Company
The electrifying, ambitious Snowpiercer takes place entirely on a moving train — but that train contains the world. Massive and powered by a perpetual motion engine, the Snowpiercer continually circles the planet on interconnected railways. It was conceived as a sort of railway equivalent to that real cruise ship that people live on, but has become a dystopian Noah's Ark instead, carrying the last remnants of the human race through a planet frozen over after a well-meaning attempt to combat global warming 17 years earlier went very wrong. It might as well be a spaceship, given how hostile the atmosphere outside it has become. The Earth is still there, but it no longer seems capable of sustaining life.
Snowpiercer, which opens in a few cities this Friday and will expand to more in later weeks, is the English-language debut from the talented Korean director Bong Joon-ho, and is as wide-ranging and tricky to pin down as the train for which it's named: It's based on a French graphic novel, and has an international cast led by Chris Evans that also includes Tilda Swinton, Song Kang-ho, John Hurt, Octavia Spencer, and Jamie Bell; it's set on a giant, impossible metaphor that it treats with winking solidity; and it's a sci-fi movie that's also a story about a bloody class war and the terrible things we do to survive and then keep doing in the name of limited resources.
Song Kang-ho
Radius/Weinstein Company
Evans is Curtis, the hesistant leader of the revolution brewing in the back of the train, where the poor are packed into a grimy, windowless area, depending on deliveries of protein blocks from the wealthier and more powerful, who live in the cars further up. Their representative is Mason, who Tilda Swinton slyly plays like a sci-fi satire on Margaret Thatcher in her conservative suits and oversized glasses, delivering wobbly lectures on knowing your place while overseeing a punishment of inventive cruelty involving forcefully exposing someone to the bitter cold outside.
Advised by the sage Gilliam (Hurt) and joined by fellow tail-section residents, including Edgar (Bell), Tanya (Spencer), and Andrew (Ewen Bremner), Curtis storms the row of gates barring passage up the train and begins a long, brutal, surreal journey into how the other cars live.
Reluctant hero is a part Evans plays very well, and his role here could be the dark flip side of his recent superhero turn — Curtis is a man who's been through too much to be idealistic, even as he rallies people on his side for a very dangerous venture. Snowpiercer is a reminder of how compelling a leading man Evan can be even out of the costume, as he invests his character with a sense of a complicated past even though the film delves quickly into action. Curtis knows there's a man in charge, the near-mythical Wilford, the creator of the "Sacred Engine." But, aside from that, he has no idea what's coming, and has to maintain a sense of unity despite this.
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