Snowpiercer Review
Most of Hollywood should dream of one day making a movie this good.
My life, much like this movie, is a study in contrasts. My last review was the new Transformers movie by Michael Bay, the Dr. Mengele of movie directors. This week I am doing Snowpiercer, a movie that is to 99% of science fiction movies what those movie are to swimming in an open sewer for 165 minutes (still preferable to most Bay flicks IMO). I was pretty well astounded at how this South Korean film could hit the mark so well and so perfectly.
Over the past few years I have become a fan of Korean film. Some is good, some is bad, but a lot of it is brilliant. This one falls into the last category and then sets up base camp to travel to other peaks of brilliance. Really, really good. In what can laughingly be called my movie reviewing career I have only once given a film all stars and no black holes (Argo, if you are curious) and unless I have a brain transplant in the hour and a half that it takes me to write this I will have my second.
Then of course there is the massive controversy between visionary director Joon-ho Boon and heavy handed studio executive Harvey Weinstien. Harvey didn’t like this film and wanted to cut 20 minutes off. He also (I did research this) wanted a voice over narration at the beginning and end that would have been totally unnecessary (and would have most earned a black hole from me). Has he never seen the difference between the theatrical release of Blade Runner, where the narration sits on the film like an 800 lb cat sitting on your face, and the Directors Cut where the film flows naturally and the director assumes that his audience is more intelligent than the dinosaurs who died to make his film? The simplification of a movie story is a sure sign that the director and/or executives have sneering contempt for their audience and think we spend all day eating, mating, and throwing feces at each other (for me it’s certainly not ALL day).
