Kara Garcia

Reaction paper on Snowpiercer This was only my second time ever watching this movie, mainly because it takes a while for a movie to seep through my pores. I usually think too hard about a film whenever it is very compelling and shocking to the system. Snowpiercer is exactly that. In a dystopian world, Curtis (Chris Evans) and his tail-end section friends live on a train created by the enigmatic and mysterious Wilford. After years of living on the train, a class system is born out of necessity or greediness, I really do not know; but it is the main proponent why the tail-end section (the poorest of the poor) decides on taking over the train car by car – led by Curtis, with the mentorship and guidance of Gilliam (John Hurt) and the help of Edgar (Jamie Bell), Tanya (Octavia Spencer), Namgoong Minsoo (Kang-ho Song), among others. Their journey and the jawdropping reveal towards the end of the movie is what keeps you watching. I really liked the analogy of creating a class system on a train and looking at it from a different perspective. The tail-end section (the poorest) and the 1%, represented by the elitist people – the ones in the saloons getting their dresses made, their hair fixed, eating all the delicious food prepared for them in abundance; it makes you rethink your choices and is truly a rude awakening that it is what is happening (and what has been happening) to us for the last 15 or so years. The violence was brutal. Most of the death scenes were hard to stomach and one could sometimes barely watch what was happening, it was too gross. I understand that for posterity’s and effects’ sake the filmmakers wanted to do it that way and it is their film, but sometimes there really is such a thing as “too much” violence. Maybe that’s the point they were trying to make – that it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. It was interesting to note that the word “balance” came up several times, and that it was subliminally shown in the movie – the Wilford logo was conceptualized from the Yin and Yang symbol (the symbol of balance and/or equality). It is further evidenced by how the classes coexisted with each other: the tail-end section “provided” the children who worked the engines and the front section provided the “food” (protein blocks) – a symbiotic relationship harnessed by Wilford and his cohorts. One more arresting moment was towards the end of the film – where the survivors see a live polar bear – it was a sign of life, meaning there could be others out there somewhere in that frozen world who were also searching for survivors. It was a symbol of hope for me – the hope that things will turn out for the better. Lastly, I think that it is unfair for Chris Evans that people/viewing public tend to put him in a box and label him simply because he has a pretty face. I have made it a point to watch a lot of his movies, mostly obscure ones, and I have to say that he’s actually an amazing and very talented actor. Shedding his Captain America/Steve Rogers persona could have been a difficult task for anybody else other than Chris Evans – as he ages, he gets better and better. Cases in point (his other films that I loved): Sunshine, The Losers, Puncture, The Iceman, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and Street Kings. He shines in both funny and serious roles, and I hope that people would take the time to see his “other” films and not just the Marvel ones and see that for themselves.