Bong Joon-ho’s dystopian masterpiece ought to be the film that everyone’s talking about this summer, just like Spielberg’s Jaws in 1975. So what went wrong? Warning: Spoilers for Snowpiercer ahead.
Radius/The Weinstein Company
This past Fourth of July, instead of going to see the fireworks, I went to see Jaws. A beautiful print of Jaws, at a beautiful old theater (BAM Harvey) where, if you pick your seats right, you can find the feeling of being totally enveloped in the screen without ever craning your neck. It was perfect, and made even more so on the big screen: the blockbuster everyone should've been seeing on Fourth of July weekend, instead of lukewarm Transformers leftovers.
Back in 1975, Jaws was the first true summer blockbuster. There was a huge marketing campaign, teaser trailers, cross-promotion with a book, all of the things we've come to associate with blockbusters today — all of that coalesced with Jaws. But Jaws didn't bulldoze the summer ($470 million worldwide, which is over $2 billion in today's terms) because of a novel marketing campaign. It was more than the sum of its high concept parts: there was the shark, of course, but what this film really had was hypnotic sound design, three unique characters, an unknown yet beguiling and dangerous world, heady narrative tension, and a twist.
It had story — unique, addictive, transfiguring story — and it had style: two things that nearly every contemporary blockbuster lacks. Whether the contemporary blockbuster features a superhero or a massive CGI monster, the narrative is always the same, the stakes never change, the world never grows. The sweeping score plays on in a continuous loop of swells. The handsome men and beautiful women become interchangeable. One major American city is destroyed, you can't remember which, there's so little truly at stake. 9/11 allusions abound. You're unmoved by the threat of the end of the world: that's how ineffective these movies have become.
Snowpiercer is the first film I've seen since District 9 that takes the tropes of the blockbuster and transforms them into something so compelling that days after seeing it, you stop can't thinking about it. It turns moviegoers into proselytizers: once you've seen it, you can't shut the fuck up.
It has the same DNA as the blockbuster, but unlike the last decade of summer films, it has a pulse. It's alive, much in the same way Jaws and the original Star Wars and Jurassic Park felt alive. And it should be the blockbuster of the summer: the thing that everyone sees, that anchors discussions for weeks, a bookmark in an ever-growing stack of summers past. The summer of 2014 — that's the summer I saw Bong Joon-Ho's Snowpiercer.
Radius/The Weinstein Company
The narrative of Snowpiercer is straightforward and set up in the first minute of the film: the world was getting way too hot; some countries decided to shoot some stuff into the atmosphere to cool it down. That backfired; the world froze. Cut to the train. In most blockbusters, the first half-hour would be spent carefully setting out exposition: here are our heroes, and here's why we should superficially care for them. Here is our setting, and here is why we should fear for its demise. Here is the threat, and here is the man or woman or creature or natural disaster that embodies that threat.
Snowpiercer, in contrast, offers a bit of barebones exposition and drops you in the thick of the plot, expecting you to piece together narrative clues. You can do this because you are a human being with a modicum of reasoning and patience: It's not that hard. But it feels novel because the contemporary blockbuster spoonfeeds us plot, oftentimes through clunky dialogue.
There's a reason for this simplicity, of course, and it's not that we've become less intelligent. It's the global film market, which now accounts for the majority of ticket sales. And when making a film for the global market, every idea has to be simple enough to readily translate not only in another language, but for another culture. All markers of identity must be clear and legible. And everything must be PG-13: the violence is endless but without blood, sex is romance without chemistry or lust or true passion. The narrative may have high stakes, but the actual actions are cold, metallic, without true consequence.
Snowpiercer, however, is one of the most visceral films I've seen: the grime and dirt and claustrophobia are palpable. The fact that it takes place on one long, single train makes it clear that every action has consequences: you can't shoot a bullet without hitting someone. You can't eat, or breath, or move without touching someone. There's a great line at the end of the film when our protagonist is asked "When is the last time you were alone?" He doesn't answer, but we know: not once in the 17 years since he's been on the train. That's the level of intimacy, of psychological claustrophobia, that this film is operating on. Who needs a love story when you've got half of existing civilization sleeping literally on top of each other?
Like Jaws, the plot of Snowpiercer is straightforward. But both films have a velocity to them: in Jaws, it's the Great White's infinite appetite; in Snowpiercer, it's the train, of course, whose speed, when shot from outside, is terrifying, but it's also the inertia of the rebellion from the back to the front, like the tide coming in if the tide was on crack.
In each film, there's a motley crowd of personages, each unique, each functioning as archetype. But these archetypes are distorted: in Jaws, there's the island police chief who's terrified of water, the scientist whose technology fails, and the salty captain with a secret past. In Snowpiercer, it's the handsome hero who's a coward, the Asian tech master who's a skilled fighter, the doting mother who's fierce and not the hero's love interest, the sage with an evil secret.
According to film history lore, Spielberg hated the way the animatronic shark looked in Jaws. Even after months of fiddling, it still looked too fake to have a prominent role in the film. Spielberg's solution, then, was to only use it at the film's end, filling the rest of the movie with score, sound design, even the shark's point-of-view in order to create tension. Add in the terrifying sight of clouds of expanding blood and you don't even need the shark: just the suggestion thereof.
Snowpiercer also saves the reveal of its own "shark," as it were, for the film's final section, and the reveal is arguably as hammy as the fake shark snapping on the back deck of the Orca. But the identity of "Wilfred," the so-called savior of humanity who constructed the train, matters far less than the journey to slay him, and that, like Jaws, is played out like a piece of exquisite choreography.
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