Snowpiercer
Aug. 8th, 2014 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueSaw Snowpiercer last night at the Somverville Theater, which I recommend. (Both the movie and seeing the movie in a good theater; it lends itself to both big-screen viewing and viewing as part of an anonymous crowd. I don't object to VOD, but this movie's an odd choice for it if you have the alternative.) It has third act problems, but that's equally true of a lot of the stories I like; it's a hazard of weird, ambitious fiction, particularly if there's an episodic element. (See also Twin Peaks, Fullmetal Alchemist...)
When I say third act problems, I'm talking about themes; I'm not bothered by the things that seem to bother other people, not just in Snowpiercer but in SF film generally. I cut films a lot of slack, by which I mean I understand what they are.
For example, film is a medium with its own grammar and limits,
which means that if it's important to understand what a character is thinking, he has to just sit down and say it, either to another character or in voiceover. Try and think of another way to do this. Usually your alternatives are either to decide you don't care whether the audience knows what that character is thinking (which reduces film to abstracted people running and shooting), or to add a lot of extra scenes to "show don't tell" which would cost you untold millions of dollars and double the runtime of the movie.
Obviously, there are more and less awkwardly written monologues, and better and worse performances. But if a film is competently made, I'm not going to ding it for having a talking scene just before the big confrontation. By the same token, when a film compresses or expands time, I'm untroubled; that's just something film does. (See also: Nitpicking Inception.)
Another thing that doesn't bother me is when speculative fiction is speculative. It's about saying "what if." If you don't like the premise, that's fine, but that doesn't make it a plot hole. If the Matrix runs on people instead of a more efficient source of power, it does. If the Empire decided a Death Star was a better weapon than a similarly-priced fleet of warships, fine. If there's a train with an engine that can run forever with energy left over for rave parties, great.
Honestly, I could say the same thing about fiction in general. If you're not willing to suspend disbelief, you're not going to get anything out of it. I can be annoyed that Woody Allen movies are constantly pairing young starlets with grizzled old men, and in fact am annoyed. But if I'm watching one I'm not going to spend the whole time saying "she'd never be attracted to him." The movie says she is. Not a plot hole. Not a plot hole when a character feels different things than I would in that situation.
So for instance both Ciro and I were pulled out of Snowpiercer for a second when the characters were disgusted to know they were eating bugs, because we are both fans of the idea of eating bugs as a solution to food scarcity. Is that the movie's problem? No. The movie could show people eating shit and we'd be disgusted but there would be a handful of people who wouldn't be. In Waterworld drinking recycled pee is presented as reasonable, and people couldn't handle it. You can't win.
All of which is a long way of saying I try to meet a film on its own ground, provided I like it enough to want to stand on the same ground.
So when I say "third act problems," I don't exactly mean "the stuff I don't like." The second category includes the appearence, in the back half of the movie, of an unspeaking weirdo pointless immortal killer, about the same time guns show back up. I think that's boring. I think the reintroduction of guns works against the premise of the film, which is about bodies crammed together in a small space; I don't want people to be able to kill each other with any kind of physical distance. I think having some invulnerable badass similarly works against the theme that these are humans who justify their cruelty as necessary because of their own vulnerability.
But because I'm working on the side of the film, I can stitch together a counterargument where the unkillable guy represents the permanence of the train, which is self-sustaining and implaccable. And along the same lines can say that guns are an industrial killing method, and that the people using them have become so zealous they're self-endangering, because what started as protection has now become so common that everyone's overly casual about it, and driven more than a little mad by it.
I can come up with a whole thing where the reappearence of the guns exists as foreshadowing (a signal that the protagonist doesn't realy understand how much control the leader of the train has), and where the unkillable dude is a foil for the girl with foresight, a way to say that this extreme circumstance is pushing people into new areas of ability, and that where in her case deprivation has made her more able to protect herself and more sensitive to other people, the evil dude has been pushed outside of being human in some sense.
I'm pretty sure I'm doing all the work of justification there and the filmmaker isn't, but I like the filmmaker enough that that's ok. (I like the filmmaker a lot, actually. Go see all his films.) I didn't build all those sets, for instance, or go to all those casting meetings. We can work together like this. I'm fine with the way that the foresight never pays off and is in there purely to be cool. I'm willing to tie myself in some complicated intellectual knots to make the "twist" about rebel leader Gilliam work emotionally -
which I do through a combination of assuming Ed Harris is a suspect source, figuring Gilliam was working some kind of complex angle to which we were never privy and may have misled Ed Harris, accepting Gilliam made some really agonized compromises to save people who would otherwise have not had any life at all, and entertaining the possibility that Ed Harris's character was somewhat psychic and pulling a lot of what he was "told by Gilliam" out of the protagonist's brain.
That's harder work than the guns and unkillable guy, mainly because it means I've had to invent a world where the director deliberately cuts his best material. By which I mean I've had to invent a world where the director had a lot of really cool ideas but chose not to share them with the audience. And I can't really use the budget excuse, because you could have done it with dialog. I kind of have to use the "audience is stupid" justification, the one that means the really clever bit about what's going on with the sun in Sunshine had to be jettisoned in favor of "the sun needs more fuel."
It happens. It's a body blow, but I can take it.
But the real third act problem is fairly insoluble. The real third act problem is that when they blow the door to the train, they destroy the train. Unnecessarily. I can come up with character reasons to make it work, like not knowing how much explosive you need, or being rushed. But that doesn't solve the thematic problem. And as I said at the top, thematic problems are what I care about.
The film isn't an exploration of scarcity, partly because you can't solve the problem of scarce resources and uneven distribution of those resources. It's kind of like the "we all die eventually" problem, or the way our life necessarily involves killing other things (such as microorganisms). It's one of those intractable problems of the human condition. You can make it better, and you can make it worse, but you can't solve it. So that's not something I expected the film to engage with; it's just the setting.
The way I read the film, it's about traditions that ossify - things you start doing for survival, but then keep doing past the point it's necessary for survival. Essentially the same sort of thing explored in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," inflected with China's one child policy. The people in the train have spent 18 years killing each other to maintain equilibrium with the understanding that there is no way to reduce scarcity.
The film takes place at a moment when this may no longer be true - when it might be possible finally to leave the train. But nobody notices (except the actual hero of the film, the gate opener) because their thoughts keep running on the same track, turning circles. (Hence the train.) Essentially, the class stuff is a red herring (one that is of itself dramatic and interesting) underneath which there is this other story going on, headlined by these not-actually-peripheral characters who have managed to retain their curiosity and faith that change is possible, that we can go beyond what we think are our limitations. I think it's not a coincidence that the girl is literally able to see past gates.
Basically, when I watch the film, I see a humanistic story hiding in the shadow of a bleak and brutal one. It's the tension between these stories that gives the film its depth and makes it about something more than hacking people to pieces in a cool but implausible SF train.
However, for no reason, when the gate gets blown, it kills everybody on the train. It looks to me like it does. Everybody but miraculously those two people. With the train breaking apart and falling into a chasm and getting buried under an avalanche. Expensively.
Which makes the entire film pointless. If the message is that humanity is doomed, you don't need them to break out of the train; you need them to be destroyed by themselves within the train. It doesn't make sense to leave the train unless leaving the train is triumphant. I can imagine a film with some similarities to Snowpiercer in which an appropriate thematic resolution is for hope to kill everyone - one in which Gilliam and Ed Harris have been working extremely hard to keep people hopeful enough they'll continue to fight and survive, but not so hopeful they wind up incautious and extinct. But it's not the film I watched for the two hours before the ending; you'd emphasize fairly different scenes, I think.
Anyway, I liked the movie.
When I say third act problems, I'm talking about themes; I'm not bothered by the things that seem to bother other people, not just in Snowpiercer but in SF film generally. I cut films a lot of slack, by which I mean I understand what they are.
For example, film is a medium with its own grammar and limits,
which means that if it's important to understand what a character is thinking, he has to just sit down and say it, either to another character or in voiceover. Try and think of another way to do this. Usually your alternatives are either to decide you don't care whether the audience knows what that character is thinking (which reduces film to abstracted people running and shooting), or to add a lot of extra scenes to "show don't tell" which would cost you untold millions of dollars and double the runtime of the movie.
Obviously, there are more and less awkwardly written monologues, and better and worse performances. But if a film is competently made, I'm not going to ding it for having a talking scene just before the big confrontation. By the same token, when a film compresses or expands time, I'm untroubled; that's just something film does. (See also: Nitpicking Inception.)
Another thing that doesn't bother me is when speculative fiction is speculative. It's about saying "what if." If you don't like the premise, that's fine, but that doesn't make it a plot hole. If the Matrix runs on people instead of a more efficient source of power, it does. If the Empire decided a Death Star was a better weapon than a similarly-priced fleet of warships, fine. If there's a train with an engine that can run forever with energy left over for rave parties, great.
Honestly, I could say the same thing about fiction in general. If you're not willing to suspend disbelief, you're not going to get anything out of it. I can be annoyed that Woody Allen movies are constantly pairing young starlets with grizzled old men, and in fact am annoyed. But if I'm watching one I'm not going to spend the whole time saying "she'd never be attracted to him." The movie says she is. Not a plot hole. Not a plot hole when a character feels different things than I would in that situation.
So for instance both Ciro and I were pulled out of Snowpiercer for a second when the characters were disgusted to know they were eating bugs, because we are both fans of the idea of eating bugs as a solution to food scarcity. Is that the movie's problem? No. The movie could show people eating shit and we'd be disgusted but there would be a handful of people who wouldn't be. In Waterworld drinking recycled pee is presented as reasonable, and people couldn't handle it. You can't win.
All of which is a long way of saying I try to meet a film on its own ground, provided I like it enough to want to stand on the same ground.
So when I say "third act problems," I don't exactly mean "the stuff I don't like." The second category includes the appearence, in the back half of the movie, of an unspeaking weirdo pointless immortal killer, about the same time guns show back up. I think that's boring. I think the reintroduction of guns works against the premise of the film, which is about bodies crammed together in a small space; I don't want people to be able to kill each other with any kind of physical distance. I think having some invulnerable badass similarly works against the theme that these are humans who justify their cruelty as necessary because of their own vulnerability.
But because I'm working on the side of the film, I can stitch together a counterargument where the unkillable guy represents the permanence of the train, which is self-sustaining and implaccable. And along the same lines can say that guns are an industrial killing method, and that the people using them have become so zealous they're self-endangering, because what started as protection has now become so common that everyone's overly casual about it, and driven more than a little mad by it.
I can come up with a whole thing where the reappearence of the guns exists as foreshadowing (a signal that the protagonist doesn't realy understand how much control the leader of the train has), and where the unkillable dude is a foil for the girl with foresight, a way to say that this extreme circumstance is pushing people into new areas of ability, and that where in her case deprivation has made her more able to protect herself and more sensitive to other people, the evil dude has been pushed outside of being human in some sense.
I'm pretty sure I'm doing all the work of justification there and the filmmaker isn't, but I like the filmmaker enough that that's ok. (I like the filmmaker a lot, actually. Go see all his films.) I didn't build all those sets, for instance, or go to all those casting meetings. We can work together like this. I'm fine with the way that the foresight never pays off and is in there purely to be cool. I'm willing to tie myself in some complicated intellectual knots to make the "twist" about rebel leader Gilliam work emotionally -
which I do through a combination of assuming Ed Harris is a suspect source, figuring Gilliam was working some kind of complex angle to which we were never privy and may have misled Ed Harris, accepting Gilliam made some really agonized compromises to save people who would otherwise have not had any life at all, and entertaining the possibility that Ed Harris's character was somewhat psychic and pulling a lot of what he was "told by Gilliam" out of the protagonist's brain.
That's harder work than the guns and unkillable guy, mainly because it means I've had to invent a world where the director deliberately cuts his best material. By which I mean I've had to invent a world where the director had a lot of really cool ideas but chose not to share them with the audience. And I can't really use the budget excuse, because you could have done it with dialog. I kind of have to use the "audience is stupid" justification, the one that means the really clever bit about what's going on with the sun in Sunshine had to be jettisoned in favor of "the sun needs more fuel."
It happens. It's a body blow, but I can take it.
But the real third act problem is fairly insoluble. The real third act problem is that when they blow the door to the train, they destroy the train. Unnecessarily. I can come up with character reasons to make it work, like not knowing how much explosive you need, or being rushed. But that doesn't solve the thematic problem. And as I said at the top, thematic problems are what I care about.
The film isn't an exploration of scarcity, partly because you can't solve the problem of scarce resources and uneven distribution of those resources. It's kind of like the "we all die eventually" problem, or the way our life necessarily involves killing other things (such as microorganisms). It's one of those intractable problems of the human condition. You can make it better, and you can make it worse, but you can't solve it. So that's not something I expected the film to engage with; it's just the setting.
The way I read the film, it's about traditions that ossify - things you start doing for survival, but then keep doing past the point it's necessary for survival. Essentially the same sort of thing explored in Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery," inflected with China's one child policy. The people in the train have spent 18 years killing each other to maintain equilibrium with the understanding that there is no way to reduce scarcity.
The film takes place at a moment when this may no longer be true - when it might be possible finally to leave the train. But nobody notices (except the actual hero of the film, the gate opener) because their thoughts keep running on the same track, turning circles. (Hence the train.) Essentially, the class stuff is a red herring (one that is of itself dramatic and interesting) underneath which there is this other story going on, headlined by these not-actually-peripheral characters who have managed to retain their curiosity and faith that change is possible, that we can go beyond what we think are our limitations. I think it's not a coincidence that the girl is literally able to see past gates.
Basically, when I watch the film, I see a humanistic story hiding in the shadow of a bleak and brutal one. It's the tension between these stories that gives the film its depth and makes it about something more than hacking people to pieces in a cool but implausible SF train.
However, for no reason, when the gate gets blown, it kills everybody on the train. It looks to me like it does. Everybody but miraculously those two people. With the train breaking apart and falling into a chasm and getting buried under an avalanche. Expensively.
Which makes the entire film pointless. If the message is that humanity is doomed, you don't need them to break out of the train; you need them to be destroyed by themselves within the train. It doesn't make sense to leave the train unless leaving the train is triumphant. I can imagine a film with some similarities to Snowpiercer in which an appropriate thematic resolution is for hope to kill everyone - one in which Gilliam and Ed Harris have been working extremely hard to keep people hopeful enough they'll continue to fight and survive, but not so hopeful they wind up incautious and extinct. But it's not the film I watched for the two hours before the ending; you'd emphasize fairly different scenes, I think.
Anyway, I liked the movie.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-08-09 03:12 am (UTC)I thought that for the film's ending to work, you have to assume that Yona and Timmy are not the only survivors, just the first two of a very small number and the most important structurally, thematically. The train is referred to, early on, as an ark; her name means dove in Hebrew. She witnesses the sign of the world's survival, which is a polar bear implying a healthy (if specialized) ecosystem, as opposed to an olive branch on a mountaintop. If she and Timmy are going to freeze to death or starve within a few days, the film appears to repudiate its own mythology. A terrible, self-consuming, socially problematic ark, but all the same.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-08-09 07:34 pm (UTC)Interesting!
That's really what confounds me, is that the movie seems to be pretty clearly saying this is an up, hopeful ending that will allow the humans to flourish unconstrained by the train. So it confuses me that the movie seems to go out of its way to make the exit catastrophic.
I suppose, going by the ark metaphor, the idea is that we need to see the train is well and truly destroyed - that it has beached, or landed, and the future is definitively outside the train, which has completed its journey. I guess I'll just have to fanon that the miraculous train also has a miraculous passenger safety system that would allow for unsuspecting people without anything resembling seatbelts to survive a tumbling fall into a ravine. And unsuspecting fish.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-08-09 08:05 pm (UTC)It's my brother's Hebrew name: יונה. I heard it and mythologically my ears pricked up, especially when we learned she could see on the other side of doors.
I guess I'll just have to fanon that the miraculous train also has a miraculous passenger safety system that would allow for unsuspecting people without anything resembling seatbelts to survive a tumbling fall into a ravine. And unsuspecting fish.
I figure quite a lot of people are dead, but I really feel the metaphor just falls over if it's everyone. Maybe some of the cars were moving slowly enough that people just got very bruised, not outright splattered.
My real problem with guns on the train was their existence in the first place, with ammo or without: if the outside world was so cold when the train started that exposure to the atmosphere froze the first escape attempt mere feet from the train, and is still cold enough that timed exposure to the atmosphere is used as a fairly gruesome punishment, why did anyone bring projectile weapons on board? The risk of punching holes in the fragile shell of metal that stands between the last remnants of humanity and a nasty ice-nine death—equalizing the atmospheres, letting in the cold—hardly seemed worth the capacity to put down armed revolt, especially when it's made clear within the film that most of the train doesn't use guns anyway. I thought it was an actual plot point when we had shots breaking glass and nobody picked up frostbite from standing too near the cracks.
[edit] The twist with Gilliam really didn't work for me—I was willing to believe that they had started out working together, but I couldn't square any of Gilliam's later behavior with a continued partnership, especially considering how many limbs he was missing. I was much happier believing that Wilford was just yanking Curtis' chain in order to bewilder and more easily persuade him. It was shocking in the moment (or would be, if this genre of film didn't prepare its audience for betrayal at any level), but unsupported.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-08-09 08:13 pm (UTC)To justify the guns (even though I like it better when there aren't guns), I see them as symbolic of two things (at least at the beginning; I don't love their reappearence): they're an echo of the way the privileged class treats the lower class generally (as people they want to keep controlled and fearful, but at a comfortable, untouchable, impersonal distance), and they're a sign of the ways the people on the train (who weren't born on the train) continue to hold on to biases and opinions based on a world that no longer exists. We use guns because officials use guns and guns are scary. We get to be in first class because we are the first class people.