- Feb 7, 2011
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I recently watched "Snowpiercer" which currently has a metacritic score of 84, and most critical reviews of it (including those of our resident Escapist movie critics) call it "smart," "provocative," and "intellectual" but when I saw it all I could think about was how stupid the movie was. The movie didn't engage me and I therefore couldn't get past all the more nonsensical elements of it.
Spoilers for "Snowpiercer" are inbound:
Now a lot of these criticisms are going to fall on deaf ears because "Dirty Hipsters, it's just an action movie, and action movies are supposed to be dumb, but this action movie has a message and that makes it smart." No, bullshit. Even the action in this action movie is dumb. The gunfight in the middle of the movie, the one you see in all the trailers and the one being praised by everyone is one of the worst parts of the entire movie.
The biggest problem with this movie is that for all the drama in it, none of the characters are there for anything but to serve the purposes of the movie. It's like each character doesn't exist for any purpose other than pushing the plot forward, they aren't people, they aren't characters, they're plot elements. That's why this movie is dumb. It's so involved with it's message about class warfare and revolutions that it forgets to create believable characters and without believable characters nothing else about the movie is believable. Some of the criticisms might be considered "nitpicks" but I wouldn't have noticed them and they wouldn't have bothered me as much as they did if the movie had been better.
Spoilers for Snowpiercer end here.
So what about the rest of you? What movies make you gag whenever someone describes them as "smart?"
Spoilers for "Snowpiercer" are inbound:
The movie doesn't make sense on a fundamental level. Multiple times during the movie we're shown shots of the train from above. You can see almost exactly how long the train is and there clearly isn't enough room in it for 10,000 people and all the food necessary to feed them indefinitely. There's some cool ideas that the movie tries to use to get around the food problem, like the fact that the protein bars that the lower class passengers eat are made out of insects, one of the more interesting "twists" of the movie. It's also one of the few twists that makes sense. Insects breed quickly and it would be fairly easy to stock enough of them to feed a population, but then you have the problem that the train doesn't have a "bug car" where they would be housed. Same with the rest of the meat, where exactly are all the cows and chickens that the upper class eat? We see a meat locker car, but we never see a farm car and they'd have to store live animals somewhere if the train has been running for years.
Then there's the design of the train that also doesn't make sense. Just think about it, the train was supposed to have been built as luxury transportation, but the order of all the train cars makes absolutely no sense. The aquarium where they serve sushi is near the back of the train and is preceded by a freezer full of meat. Are you telling me that the ultra rich elite who live in first class are expected to walk through a meat locker full of animal carcasses in order to eat sushi? How about the positioning of the sauna right next to the nightclub. In order to get into the nightclub from the first class residential quarters requires you to go through a sauna. We see how the people in first class obsess about their appearance, their hair, their make up and you're telling me they're willing to walk through a sauna and ruin their clothing, hair, and make up on their way to the nightclub?
Then there's just the movie's general writing that bothered me. So much if it just doesn't work. Many of the characters' motivations are either entirely unexplained or just plain stupid. What exactly is the motivation of the characters to leave the train and go outside? Outside of the train is death. A guy's arm froze solid after being outside the train for only 7 minutes, and these people expect to somehow survive that? It's hard to survive in the snow, and it's even harder to survive in the snow when you have no access to food and no survival skills because you've lived your whole life on a train and don't know how to scavenge food in the wild. The last shot of the movie is two children climbing out of the wrecked train into the snow and seeing a polar bear walking around. This scene is meant to show that everything will be ok and that life always finds a way, but if you really think about it the last scene of the movie is two young children stuck in a frozen wasteland with a giant predator. After the screen went black and the credits rolled those kids got eaten.
Then there's the design of the train that also doesn't make sense. Just think about it, the train was supposed to have been built as luxury transportation, but the order of all the train cars makes absolutely no sense. The aquarium where they serve sushi is near the back of the train and is preceded by a freezer full of meat. Are you telling me that the ultra rich elite who live in first class are expected to walk through a meat locker full of animal carcasses in order to eat sushi? How about the positioning of the sauna right next to the nightclub. In order to get into the nightclub from the first class residential quarters requires you to go through a sauna. We see how the people in first class obsess about their appearance, their hair, their make up and you're telling me they're willing to walk through a sauna and ruin their clothing, hair, and make up on their way to the nightclub?
Then there's just the movie's general writing that bothered me. So much if it just doesn't work. Many of the characters' motivations are either entirely unexplained or just plain stupid. What exactly is the motivation of the characters to leave the train and go outside? Outside of the train is death. A guy's arm froze solid after being outside the train for only 7 minutes, and these people expect to somehow survive that? It's hard to survive in the snow, and it's even harder to survive in the snow when you have no access to food and no survival skills because you've lived your whole life on a train and don't know how to scavenge food in the wild. The last shot of the movie is two children climbing out of the wrecked train into the snow and seeing a polar bear walking around. This scene is meant to show that everything will be ok and that life always finds a way, but if you really think about it the last scene of the movie is two young children stuck in a frozen wasteland with a giant predator. After the screen went black and the credits rolled those kids got eaten.
Now a lot of these criticisms are going to fall on deaf ears because "Dirty Hipsters, it's just an action movie, and action movies are supposed to be dumb, but this action movie has a message and that makes it smart." No, bullshit. Even the action in this action movie is dumb. The gunfight in the middle of the movie, the one you see in all the trailers and the one being praised by everyone is one of the worst parts of the entire movie.
We get a weird completely uncharacterized antagonist who seems to be working as part of the train's security force, and he's so hell bent on finding and killing the main characters that he shoots up the train himself, shoots all his own men on purpose, and shoots a bunch of first class passengers. And for what? What was his plan? What was his motivation? What was his end game? Nothing about him is ever explained so he just comes off like a giant moron. It's like the director felt that the movie was dragging its legs a little and decided to drop The Terminator in there just for the hell of it. This is not what smart movies do. Smart movies don't just drop in random characters with no characterization whatsoever and expect us to care.
Then there's the biggest action setpiece of the whole movie, the ending. The drug addict wants to use all the explosives that he's collected to blow open the door of the train and escape to freedom. He explodes the door, the explosion causes and avalanche, and the entire train is destroyed. My thoughts on this: why did he need all those explosives to blow up the steel door when he could have used a smaller amount and exploded a window instead? There are train cars that have huge top to bottom windows which would shatter from a much smaller explosive charge and which where in the middle of the train and not the front. Why not blow those up instead? Well because that guy isn't a character, he's a plot device, he's just there to open doors for the protagonist.
Then there's the biggest action setpiece of the whole movie, the ending. The drug addict wants to use all the explosives that he's collected to blow open the door of the train and escape to freedom. He explodes the door, the explosion causes and avalanche, and the entire train is destroyed. My thoughts on this: why did he need all those explosives to blow up the steel door when he could have used a smaller amount and exploded a window instead? There are train cars that have huge top to bottom windows which would shatter from a much smaller explosive charge and which where in the middle of the train and not the front. Why not blow those up instead? Well because that guy isn't a character, he's a plot device, he's just there to open doors for the protagonist.
The biggest problem with this movie is that for all the drama in it, none of the characters are there for anything but to serve the purposes of the movie. It's like each character doesn't exist for any purpose other than pushing the plot forward, they aren't people, they aren't characters, they're plot elements. That's why this movie is dumb. It's so involved with it's message about class warfare and revolutions that it forgets to create believable characters and without believable characters nothing else about the movie is believable. Some of the criticisms might be considered "nitpicks" but I wouldn't have noticed them and they wouldn't have bothered me as much as they did if the movie had been better.
Spoilers for Snowpiercer end here.
So what about the rest of you? What movies make you gag whenever someone describes them as "smart?"
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