Snowpiercer - vision and ambition that doesn't quite grab you by the shoulders as it should

Here was a film that was extraordinary in many ways, but which was also somewhat ordinary in some crucial ways that made the overall film feel like a tiny bit of a let-down and a little bit of a wasted potential.

Let’s start with an introduction to the setting and the best thing about this film. Snowpiercer is set after an attempt to stave off climate change disaster goes horribly wrong and causes the world to freeze. (There is something unnerving when the first date on the expositional news report is three days from when I saw it – and incidentally, the date I got round to typing this up – spooky!) Seventeen years later and a specially designed, self-sufficient train is still travelling around the world with a few hundred of so passengers, ruthlessly split into an elite luxury front section and a miserable, poorly fed, oppressed tail section.   The production design and vision on the film to create this unusual and disturbing world is exemplary: imaginative and both otherworldly and realistic.  It is like a compressed microcosm of the production design in the Hunger Games films (which thematically it is very similar to) distilled into a much smaller universe.  The detail and visual imagination behind it is highly impressive.

The visuals just about overcame what is a pretty clichéd plot, with a twist that felt rather predictable and a nonsensical (if visually spectacular) ending that didn't really go with what went before. The scenario felt imaginative and original but the narrative arc felt a little stale and unconvincing. I even started to wonder if in the fight over final cut between the director and Harvey Weinstein, if the latter might just have been trying to fix this weakness, although if the cuts were to make it more commercial, then perhaps not.  I have to say that if I had seen this film between a couple of summer blockbusters, I probably wouldn't have had these qualms – it is certainly better than many half-decent big Hollywood pictures in this respect.  But it suffered a little by comparison sat in the middle of me watching a lot of festival films, with their more unique stories to tell and characters to bring to life.  I was entertained throughout but never quite as gripped as I would have liked.

Within this, there were some fantastic scenes. One standout was in a primary school type class, where young children are frighteningly indoctrinated into loving Wilford, train owner and engineer.  IT is a smart piece of exposition and a toe-curlingly horrible piece of black comedy.  Another standout scene is a bloody fight in a sauna car, full of sweltering tension.

A talented cast is a little let down by weaker characterisation and script than they needed.  Octavia Sepncer, in particular, deserved better, though she does her best with a frantic mother role. Jamie Bell has fun with a mouthy sidekick role (inexplicably Irish accent and all), but has probably played a variation of that part a few times before.  And it felt like John Hurt and Ed Harris did their John Hurt and Ed Harris thing, which is of course magnetic, but not exactly stretching for them and not as interesting as they could have been.  Song Kang-Ho is good support as a security expert, bringing world-weary cynicism and simmering anger.  Alison Pill and Tilda Swinton are the real standouts from  this cast though. Pill’s slightly deranged school teacher is ferociously and unnervingly funny.  And Tilda Swinton does the live action version of Wallace and Gromit villain (it has to be seen to believed) and I mean that in as complimentary way as possible.  It is Swinton that sets the film’s tone as slightly unreal, with a deranged stir-craziness from being trapped on board that has infected everyone, an unsettling unspoken mood that lies under the surface of the film.

Chris Evans is effective in the lead and his character Curtis proves an interesting comparator to the recent Captain America film.  Curtis, like Steve Rogers, is trying to do the right thing, trying to find a moral compass in a series of impossible moral dilemmas, is a reluctant leader who wants to protect others from harm but feels he has no choice to pull them into it.  They are distinct characters and Evans mines a gritty, grim darkness from Curtis, particularly when he reveals his back story motivation near the end.  In his scenes near the end with Harris where being faced with impossible choices, you really feel how lost Curtis is by that point.

Snowpiercer may well have been hampered in its plotting and characterisation by its source material, which I’m not familiar with.  Through a talented cast and superb design and vision it brings out something that captures the imagination and looks and feels like little else – it is certainly worth seeing for these aspects.   But once the lights have gone up, there is a feeling of what it could have been, of a level that it could have stepped up to, but it is still entertaining and worth viewing.