CAPSULE: Snowpiercer (2014, Dir. Joon-ho Bong)

Let's talk, Abbott followers, Tory toadies, drinkers of the Tea Party Kool-Aid... Let's talk, climate change deniers... You 1%'ers... Delicates, chewing up the weak, the young, the elderly, in the cogs of survival. It's coming, hedonists, while you continue eating sushi off the backs of child workers wearing down the tiny hands that grease the tiny cogs of your world-exhausting lifestyle. It looks like it is time for Hollywood's slurry feeding self-servers to wake up. The capitalist machine is turning in on itself. It's now making art out of social prognostics. Our entertainers see the end of the world and they are throwing it back in our faces.

Snowpiercer certainly isn't the first of its ilk, but it is one of the most effective of recent times. Perhaps because it harks from outside the system. Adapted from a Euro-minded graphic novel,  'Le Transperceneige' by kooky Korean director, Bong Joon-ho, Snowpiercer takes place 16 years after we humans have ushered in a new ice age in a bungled effort to trump global warming. The remains of human civilisation, in microcosm, has been existing on a single train that hurtles around the globe, one revolution every year. For some, this existence is all backlight parties, steak dinners and reflective knitting time, for others it is a grinding, cannibalistic drudge-fest in the tail of the train, kept in check by Tilda Swinton's bureaucratically imperious, very toothy, very Thatcheresque, Mason.

Bong's high concept dystopian vision doesn't take too much to unpack but that doesn't detract from its emphatic statement. The film's compact world-building is effective in intensifying the social commentary, which shuttles from Nineteen Eighty Four (a link made all that more strong by the presence of John Hurt as the tail's sagely leader) to "Brave New World". Each carriage of the train serves it own purpose in the funicular society and each carries its own particular design, which plays nicely to Bong's tone-shifting strengths. What's more, the continual atmospheric development allows for some impressive (and impressively brutal) visual artistry on the part of both the director and the production design team, all of which adds interest to the relatively simple narrative led by Chris Evans' revolting hero figure.

That's not to say that Evans doesn't put in a solid performance, just that Bong's film isn't necessarily about its hero. Snowpiercer may be cast in Hollywood's blockbuster mould but Bong is never beholden to it. He forcibly asserts his Korean aesthetic, both in the casting of one of his country's biggest stars, Kang-ho Song, as a drug addled locksmith, and in the fact that he (rather cleverly) allows him to perform his entire role in Korean. The free-form, carriage by carriage drama is as beautifully esoteric as Bong's previous films and those of his countryman, Chan-wook Park, who gets a reasonable homage in one of the film's most savage scenes. It's a special mix that audiences should eat up and probably would given a wider release.

Suffice to say, Snowpiercer is well worth the ride, even if you have to put up with a touch too much exposition in the closing scenes. Mansplaining aside, the film is a mesmerising portrait of a not too distant future. In fact, strip out the train and yore probably not looking at the future at all; what's left is a pretty fair representation of our current global economic ecosystem. A great take on how our science fictions are becoming social facts.

★★★★

Trailer: