SNOWPIERCER 3.5****

Within the space of a 60-foot-by-9-foot train car, “Snowpiercer” packs in more action, inventiveness, energy and ideas than most summer blockbusters that have whole galaxies at their disposal.  It is a sleek sci-fi/action epic that has a lot on its mind and a exhilarating sense of momentum and pacing. This thing MOVES.

The “thing” in question is the Snowpiercer, a super train built by an eccentric billionaire named Wilford that circles the earth exactly once per year. In  the year 2014 when an attempt to arrest  global warming backfires and plunges the world into a deadly Ice Age,  the Snowpiercer becomes an “ark train” for the last 1,000 people on earth, hurtling round and round the world for the next 17 years.

It’s been a rough ride, especially for the poor…. i.e. the lower class of the survivors. The movie starts at the back of the train, where the poorest  are crammed together in grubby cots like refugees, subsisting on gelatinous protein bars ( which you later discover are made of finely ground up roaches and colored black), who are prodded and threatened (and even tortured) by gun-wielding guards. Every once in a while, the officious Minister Mason (an unrecognizable and riotously funny Tilda Swinton, looking like a cross between Margaret Thatcher and a  toad) comes to the back to sternly lecture the rabble not to want anything more than the bare-bones subsistent they’re given. “Know. Your. Place,” she shouts.

A few, though, have had enough of their squalid life. Curtis (Chris Evans…looking very different from his gleaming Captain America role) plans to lead a revolt and storm forward through the train to the front, where the never-seen Wilford is supposedly running the engine, and seize control.

Up until the halfway point, “Snowpiercer” feels like a wildly clever but still relatively straightforward action movie, with a clear narrative goal in sight. But then things start to change. There are oddly lyrical moments amid the mayhem of extreme close-ups of people killing or being killed.. The effect is disorienting. Then, as the rebels move forward, they start to enter the train cars used by the wealthy riders. These are positively surreal, including an aquarium that arches over the ceiling of the train car, then there’s a car full of peach trees, and, most strangely, a cheery classroom train in which the perky teacher (Allison Pill) leads the children in peppy songs extolling the saintliness of the revered Wilford. The grubby, blood-spattered rebels seem wildly out of place in these surreal venues.

As the rebels get closer to the train’s engine, we realize that the real engine driving “Snowpiercer” isn’t action but ideas, big ideas and not just about economic inequality (although that’s a big driver here) but the very nature of a functioning civilization itself. The movie makes you  consider whether it’s human nature to want to live in an unequal society where we need to feel envious of the guy in the train car in front of us and fearful of the guy in the train car behind us. “Snowpiercer” seamlessly blends all its elements together into a masterpiece of thought-provoking science fiction  that turns out to be one hell of a ride.

Rated “R” for heavy violence and some language and drug content.

Clark

NOTE: You may not find this at the theaters as it got a very limited release…but it’s already out on DVD and TV channels and Netflix.