Marketing for Snowpiercer has been extremely light, and one has to wonder if things will pick up if the film continues to garner reviews like the one's found below. This might ended up being the best reviewed comic book movie of the year and most comic fans probably don't even realize that is where the story originated from. Although, I wouldn't blame them for that, since it is a French graphic novel. To be more specific it's, Le Transperceneige, created by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette.
An enormously ambitious, visually stunning and richly satisfying futuristic epic from the gifted Korean genre director Bong Joon-ho.
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Throughout, Bong gets away with much that he almost surely would have had to curtail if working at an American studio. For starters, the pic’s pacing is more measured than most of its type, but never slack, with lots of time taken out for nuanced, character-building scenes that increase our level of emotional involvement. Important backstories are deployed only gradually, constantly shifting our sense of who the characters are and what motivates them. (As in “The Host,” too, all bets are off on who dies and who gets to live.) By the end, the film reveals itself as a surprisingly thoughtful contemplation of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, and whether mankind is worth trying to save at all. Somber stuff, to be sure, but not without flashes of hope, and a steady infusion of Bong’s dark, quirky humor.
Full Review at variety.com
Cinema is a medium of motion and if anyone understands this, it appears to be Bong Joon-ho, whose visionary new work is a demented and stunning thrillride. In his first production outside his native South Korea, Bong has delivered his most ambitious project yet, and proves more than capable of handling an international, multilingual cast and a large budget.
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Following the disappointment of Kim Jee-woon's The Last Stand and the lukewarm reception of Park Chan-wook's meticulous chamber piece Stoker, Bong Joon-ho has created with Snowpiercer the most accomplished overseas work of any Korean filmmaker to-date. While it remains to be seen whether or not mainstream western audiences will embrace Bong's dark and ferocious genre film, in many ways he's already beaten Hollywood at its own game. A tour de force of science fiction, Snowpiercer is a singular and breathtaking cinematic experience.
Full Review at twitchfilm.com
The film is set in a future where, after a failed experiment to stop global warming, an ice age has killed off nearly all life on the planet. The only survivors are the inhabitants of the 'Snowpiercer', a massive train that travels around the planet and is powered by a perpetual-motion engine. Over time a class system evolves on the train, with the elites inhabiting the 'front' of the train and poor inhabiting the 'back' of the train. Tired of the poor conditions suffered by riders in the 'back', a revolution occurs with the riders attempting to seize control of the engine which the elites in the 'front' consider 'sacred'.
Snow Piercer is directed by Joon-ho Bong. The cast includes Chris Evans, Ed Harris, Octavia Spencer, Jamie Bell, Tilda Swinton, Alison Pill and Song-Kang-ho. The film will hit theaters Summer 2013.
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