Know your place: keep your place.

Snowpiercer - 4/5

I miss comedic Chris Evans. That dude is the bomb. Even in Captain America, he’s still there beneath the stoicism; a beautiful naivete played for the occasional buffoonery. Here, he is just the super surrious parts and it’s a bit off-putting because, well, it’s not the strongest acting job, and it would threaten to weigh the movie down, except except except: that everything around him is so fucking weird. Tilda Swinton has the most possible fun of things and, from her appearance onwards, it’s this bizarro world placed next to this dude who does not smile and it works. It only works because he takes himself seriously, and so the division between the lower and upper carts is that much more night and DayGlo. It’s starting a war with a people who have no idea war was even an eventuality. You don’t believe you’re the bad guy because you don’t see the bad that you do. You can’t see what’s coming. That entire middle part is ‘The Raid’ by way of a circus train, but with a point!. And as much as a living metaphor the movie is, I don’t think it drives it hard enough. There are valuable points to be pushed – a need for a lower class, the unknowing blindness of the higher tiers, rising from below to above in order to help the below but enjoying the above way too much, the relative badness of the people at the bottom and the relative goodness of the people at top – and it just doesn’t press against them hard enough. It had the tone nailed enough to handle those questions in an interesting way, and so “start over” doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to. That’s an easy answer to a very complex engine of history and human emotions. On the other hand: maybe I shouldn’t be looking for answers in a movie where a train never stops moving. I don’t know. It flew too close to the sun, so it makes me envious of what could be found there. IT FLEW TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN, BUT IT DID NOT MELT MY HEART. GUYS. GUYS. IS ANYONE HEARING THIS?