There’s reason I’ve been beating the Snowpiercer drum ever since I first heard about it. Korean director Bong Joon-Ho’s The Host (not the Stephanie Meyer one, the good one) is one of my favourite films of the last decade, and having the filmmaker dabble in a mixture of sci-fi and social commentary again gets me all bubbly in my underpants.
And now it seems that all my efforts to mix my metaphors and get you guys drinking the Joon-Ho kool-aid was rather well placed, as the first reviews have started coming in, and they’re calling it a masterpiece.
TwitchFilm‘s Pierce Conran has seen the film and he described Joon-Ho’s tale of the last remnants of mankind trying to survive a second Ice Age by living on a permanently moving train, as “a demented and stunning thrillride” that fires on all cylinders. They go on to say that Snowpiercer is “the most accomplished overseas work of any Korean filmmaker to-date…in many ways he’s already beaten Hollywood at its own game. A tour de force of science fiction, ‘Snowpiercer’ is a singular and breathtaking cinematic experience.”
And they’re not the only ones who loved it. Variety‘s Scott Foundas found it to be “an enormously ambitious, visually stunning and richly satisfying futuristic epic from the gifted Korean genre director”, which true to Joon-Ho’s style questions and informs as much as it entertains. Foundas calls it “a surprisingly thoughtful contemplation of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, and whether mankind is worth trying to save at all. Somber stuff, to be sure, but not without flashes of hope, and a steady infusion of Bong’s dark, quirky humor.”
Now if those lofty praises aren’t enough to whet your appetites, a new prequel animated short film has also been released that helps to establish this frigid post-apocalyptic world.
There’s still no official international release date set for Snowpiercer, but I hope that the The Weinstein Company – who hold the distribution rights outside of Joon-Ho’s native South Korea – get this movie slated soon, as I don’t think I can wait any longer. Maybe I can create my own Ice Age and freeze myself until it eventually comes out.
“Snowpiercer,” based on the French graphic novel “Le Transperceneige,” is set in a future where, after a failed experiment to stop global warming, an Ice Age kills off all life on the planet except for the inhabitants of the Snow Piercer, a train that travels around the globe and is powered by a sacred perpetual-motion engine. A class system evolves on the train but a revolution brews.
Last Updated: July 24, 2013
