This review is of the TV-14 edited version of the film. All thoughts below should be addressed as such as a review of the unedited version would be more negative

Snowpiercer is a film that started out rather solid but got weaker as the film went on. It just wasn’t really able to handle the amount of pressure on its shoulders. The film started to go more into shock value and the whole ending starts to get annoyed. I’ll give the film props for the surprise ending since I didn’t expect it to go so dark with the bear but it works pretty well. Sometimes humanity just isn’t ready for the comeback.

The film introduces us to a world that has entered a new ice age. Humanity has been wiped out with the exception of all the people aboard one long train. This train never stops and continues to circle the planet constantly. The train cars divide the rich from the poor so the rich get an amazing life with everything that they could ever want while the poor struggle to just barely survive. They only get the scraps at best and so Curtis has been waiting a while to launch a full scale rebellion. It’s a risky plan because no rebellion has ever succeeded before. Still, he can’t just continue to live life the way he has been because there is no future to it. So he gathers everyone up and preparers to move forward. Time to see if they can pull this off.

The deck is stacked against the heroes in a lot of ways of course. They have the sheer numbers advantage by a great deal which is their only advantage. The enemies have better equipment and homefield advantage though. Curtis and the others have to learn as they go while the villains have cameras and already know the layout. So that makes things tricky and it turns out that the villains also have some of the best fighters on the ship. As the film goes on we also see just how different life on the rich side is.

The whole film really focuses on the parallels here as the poor don’t have enough food to even survive but the rich are rather wasteful. The poor are unlikely to see any fresh water while the rich have whole pools to have fun with. In general this is the poor vs the rich in a very literal way and it’s fun to watch the main characters try to get to the end of the train. So you may be thinking, what’s the problem?

Well so first up we have the backstory for Curtis that shows up later on. The film wants to show us to a really intense degree how much the main characters had to go through. This involves murder and cannibalism and it felt like a very unnecessary addition to the film. We didn’t need these extra details because their lives sucked enough as it is. Adding these details is just to make the whole movie very grim dark.

Then by the end of the film we find out what happens to the kids. Yeah here we go, the whole film you know it’s going to be something rather sinister and of course that is the case. It’s another messed up subplot and the whole thing is so traumatic that the kid gets brainwashed into this rather quickly. There wasn’t exactly anyone to help the kids out after all. Other characters get limbs chopped off, murdered, etc. The body count in the film is rather high and it’s not afraid to get rather violent at times. The movie is rather brutal and the message is basically that you can’t beat the system. At most you can try for mutually assured destruction which isn’t all that satisfying.

We see that what the main characters are forced to eat is rather gross but that’s the film’s style so you aren’t all that surprised. Basically what it boils down to is that the film overplays its hand tremendously. After a point you get it, it sucks to be poor in this setup. Every revelation after that is just to make the whole situation more and more messed up. The heroes also tend to lower their guard a whole lot during the battles which results in their getting shot. The stakes are a their absolute highest here so you really just have to keep on shooting and fighting back.

One of the most intense fights is definitely when the heroes broke into a gang car and had to start fighting each other. That was definitely real crazy and I have to say I don’t know how they survived for long once the room went dark. It felt like they should all have been immediately slaughtered at that point. It’s good that they weren’t of course but when you can’t even see the opponents that is hard to get around.

As for the villains, well they’re basically ultra evil so there isn’t much to say about them. The main villain is rather psychotic and the fact that Curtis listens to his whole speech for so long and freezes up by the end was crazy. This is the guy at the top, you have to take him down immediately. The whole climax was a bit surreal with the villain not reading the room and Curtis not really doing anything. It is easy to see how this setup worked for so long though since they have so much power. In a way the whole film shouldn’t have been as long as it was.

The only real excuse would be that the villains wanted to have some fun because they were super bored. That could work but otherwise they could have ended this at any point. I haven’t seen a situation so rigged in a while. The film definitely works best when everything was a mystery. I do think the train setting worked well and it’s a very interesting film. Ultimately it just got way too mean spirited by the end and you also start to wonder what the whole point of it all was. I don’t think that the second half really stuck the landing the way that it could have.

Overall, Snowpiercer is definitely a film that’s not for the faint of heart. You’re going to see just how intense an uprising can be and how a lot of casualties really start forming in order for the main characters to even stand a chance. A prequel could be interesting to see more about how the setup was first implemented and the original rebellions. We do know that things won’t end well which takes out some of the fun but I am curious how this started. Of course once the villains have been winning for hundreds of years it is easy to see how they have all of the power but how was this accumulated in the first place? That’s what I would really like to know.

Overall 3/10