Genre: Sci-fi
Premise: In a future where the world’s been frozen over, a young man on a train that never stops leads a revolution to topple the train’s tyrannical leader.
About: Snowpiercer was co-written by Korean director Joon-ho Bong, who’s making his first American film. He’s best known for his films The Host and Mother. Kelly Masterson, who made revisions to the script, wrote the excellent “Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead,” yet strangely hasn’t written anything since (that was an excellent screenplay – so I’m kinda shocked he didn’t blow up after it). Snowpiercer stars Captain America himself, Chris Evans. It’s already been shot and will be released later this year, although curiously, no release date has been set.
Writers: Joon-ho Bong and Kelly Masterson, based on the French comic book series created by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette
Details: 110 pages (final draft – 11/11/11).
Along with its cool title, hip director and shiny lead actor, Snowpiercer has itself some pretty slick visuals if you’re to go by its trailer. Ever since I saw The Host way back when, I’ve been intrigued by Bong as a director. The guy was one of the first to prove that big effects didn’t have to come from a Hollywood budget. I guess it was only natural, then, that he’d work his way over to the states.
However, the U.S. is a little different, and something I’ve noticed over time is that the Asian point of view doesn’t always translate well in the U.S. And it probably shouldn’t. Cultures are different. They like a lot of different things. I saw that earlier this year with the Chan-wook Park film, Stoker. And I saw it with The Host, too.
I bring this up because my opinion on Snowpiercer is not a good one. And I don’t know how much of that is because of bad storytelling or because of a cultural divide. But this script did not work for me. I guess because I wanted it to succeed so bad, I’m looking for excuses why it didn’t.
It’s 2031, 17 years after the world’s nations sent a chemical called “CW-7” into the air to stop global warming. Looks like their chemical worked a little too well. It’s now freezing out. Worse than a morning-Chicago-commute-in-February freezing. Almost everyone died in this global freeze-a-thon. Except for a few lucky ones, like Wilfred. Wilfred was one of the few who foresaw the chemical agent apocalypse, and so he built a train.
A train, you say? But how is a train the best option for taking on global freezing? That’s one of the many baffling questions Snowpiercer will pose. But yeah, so this eccentric billionaire built a train that travels around the world and never stops. It’s powered by a super-engine that never dies. How? Oh, you wouldn’t believe me if I told you. It’s one of the big reveals of Snowpiercer and it’s so ludicrous, I can’t repeat it. But, moving on…
So this guy, Curtis, is one of the poor souls at the back of the train. These are the nobodies, the slop, the trash. They live in deplorable conditions while the rich eat their caviar and drink their champagne in the front cars. Too bad for them, Curtis is tired of being left out. So he puts together an army to march through all the cars and to kill Wilfred.
But first he’s going to need the gate opener, Namgoong. Namgoong designed the gates between each car before becoming a Chronole addict. He’s since been sent to prison with his 17 year old daughter, who’s ALSO a Chronole addict. Curtis makes a deal with the both of them. For every gate they open, he’ll give them a bag of Chronole. They’re in.
There are others who join the charge as well. They’re Tanya, whose child was stolen by the rich. She wants him back. There’s Curtis’s best friend and second-in-command, Edgar. There’s the old man of the club, 70 year-old Gilliam. Each wants to get to the front of the train for their own reasons. Not all will make it. And the ones who do (spoiler) will be shocked to find out their revolt may not have been their decision in the first place.
Oh boy.
I mean. Okay. Wow. Snowpiercer is one of the more bizarre pieces of material I’ve read all year.
One of the first things you want to make sure of when you write a script is that your concept passes the logic test. It needs to make sense and be understandable. Because if your concept’s weak, anything you place on top of it is going to make it weaker. Things are going to start creaking. They will start buckling. And pretty soon they will all fall down.
The concept in Snowpiercer? It’s the future. We’re in a self-imposed ice age. So in order to battle this a man builds… a train?? I’m sorry but how does this make sense? There is no connective logic there whatsoever. How does a train stave off cold? Wouldn’t it be a billion times easier to build a bunker? I mean then you wouldn’t have to worry about maintaining 30,000 miles of track over the course of 20 years, right?
To me, this was the script-killer of all script-killers. The mythology here was just too poorly thought-through. Nobody sat down and thought past the cool-factor of each idea. I mean, when you watched The Matrix, you got the sense that the Wachowskis knew their world inside-out. Even if you thought some of it was weird, you knew they knew it. That isn’t the case here. Most of the stuff feels like a sixth-grader thought it up and everyone just went with it without a second thought.
There were also some really goofy choices here. For example, one of the train cars they have to go through is a club. Like, “boom boom boom” – a dance club. In a world where these are the last remaining humans and every square inch of living space is vital, why are they wasting an entire train car on a club???
We also get weird lines of dialogue, like when one of the rebels throws a shoe at a guard, the resulting tantrum results in this line: “This is disorder. This is size ten chaos.” Or when it’s revealed that Curtis had to resort to cannibalism before he was on the train, he offers this line, “Do you know what I hate the most about myself? I fucking hate that I know what part of a human tastes good. I know that young babies taste the best.” I don’t’ even know what to say about that line!
I wish the faults stopped there but even the main character was confusing. I never really knew what made Curtis tick – why he wanted to do this. There’s this vague reference to him being afraid to lead, but it was never explored or explained in a way that we could get behind. I mean at least Tanya had a clear motivation – she was trying to find her kid. Why does a secondary character have a clearer and stronger motivation than your hero?
To the writers’ credit, there were a few fun characters. Namgoong, our drug addict, was kind of fun in a slightly-more-dangerous Han Solo way. There were these badass twin villains that I liked. There was this huge beast guy who makes an appearance in an early battle. There were definitely moments where I could visualize a cool scene in the theater.
But see, there’s the trap that so many writer-directors fall into. They’re so focused on the visuals that they don’t make sure it works on the page first. And it’s gotta work on the page. Bong has an amazing visual sense. The Host showed that. But you gotta give us a story or none of the visuals will matter. That’s Storytelling 101.
If I were writing this, I’d make everything about the train a mystery. The guys in the back have no idea why they’ve been on this train since they were born. And one day they decide they want to know more. And they start fighting their way from car to car. With each car, they learn a new clue as to what this train is and what they’re doing on it. In other words, instead of knowing the whole backstory before we meet our characters, we’re learning what’s going on as our characters do. I think that mystery would make this story a lot more fun. At the end, they’d probably find out that they were food for the rich (cannibalism is already a part of the script – this would allow them to incorporate it more fully).
You’d then have to redo the entire mythology. Get rid of the weird global warming “so let’s build a train” stuff. I still don’t know why a never-stopping train would need to be built for any reason, but I’m sure if a dozen Scriptshadow folks brainstormed the idea for twenty minutes they could come up with 10 better reasons than this one.
Of course, it’s all too late for that. The script has been shot. The movie is wrapped. I just hope Bong fixed some of these issues in the meantime.
[ ] what the hell did I just read?
[x] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Play devil’s advocate with every idea you come up with, especially when you’re creating new worlds in sci-fi or fantasy scripts. Snowpiercer could’ve avoided so many plot holes if someone would’ve simply challenged its goofy ideas. “Why would someone build a train to keep people warm?” “If someone has an undying energy source in a freezing world, why are they using it on a train instead of as a heat source?” “If nobody can live outside, who’s maintaining the 30,000 miles of track the train is on?” “Do you really think that 20 years could pass without a single track maintenance problem?” Playing devil’s advocate ensures the script doesn’t cheat.
