Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, Jean‑Marc Rochette, Kelly Masterson, and Bong Joon Ho, 2013
#13, 2014 Skandies
The premise of this movie, as a little girl helpfully explains, is that our planet is full of frigging morons who get turned into popsicles. Specifically, in attempting to combat global warming through the wonders of chemtrails, we overcorrect, plunge the world into a catastrophic ice age, and kill everyone on earth. The only exceptions are the thousand people aboard an immense train, designed by an eccentric survivalist, that completes a global circuit once each year. How do you make a serious film with such a ridiculous starting point? The answer, apparently, is that you don’t. This movie is silly. But that doesn’t necessarily make it bad! It is usually not a compliment to call anything “one‐dimensional”, but setting this movie on a train—putting it, in the parlance of interactive fiction, “on rails”— restricts the plot in an interesting way: when the desperately impoverished masses in the back of the train decide that it’s time to revolt, they can only move in one direction: forward. And the further forward they go, the swankier the train cars get—the movie takes the x‑axis of a wealth graph and makes it literal. We follow the rebels from the dirt‐caked, blood‐smeared squalor of their rattling slums up to the guards’ barracks, and then to the tanks where gigantic insects are ground up into the protein blocks they eat, forward to the water cars, and then to… the meat lockers, the orchards, the sushi bar, the dental offices, the elementary school, the saunas, the speakeasies, the raves, and eventually to the fortified front car of the master of the world. So, yes, the movie is indeed ludicrous, but as a parable for a ludicrous class disparity among a population clinging to dying planet, maybe it has to be.
