Are You A Shoe Or A Hat?
The Tail vs. The Front

In lots of post-apocalypse movies, we’ve seen how humans strive for survival even if it means making harsh acts such as violence and sacrifice. Every survivor has a place to ensure its safety in an individualistic way, but on a closed-tight community it has a different role. Often times, these communities struggle to maintain stability due to its population and available resources; thus, harsh decisions occur to enforce balance and stability. Therefore, the community begins to shift leading to a series of incidents that ends in an open-ended confusion that asks us, “what’s next?” The following movie that sprawls on man-made disasters leading to captivity and ending on a revolution sparks conversation about our actions towards our society and environment.

Snowpiercer (2013) is directed by Bong Joon Ho and written by Bong Joon Ho and Kelly Masterson as an adaptation of the French comic book, Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand and Jean-Marc Rochette. The film details the onboard passengers of the Wilford Locomotive Train which travels around the world during the 2030s, a time where Earth is completely frozen due to failed man-made solution to climate change. This humongous train is an ark where each car represents a function to the front car, the sacred engine. However, the tail car holds the poor passengers who serves as slaves for the whole train and are treated in inhuman conditions. As such, one man stands up, Curtis Everett (Chris Evans) to lead a revolution between the tail car against the whole train reaching the sacred engine. Accompanied by other rebels, Edgar (Jaime Bell), Gilliam (John Hurt), Tanya (Octavia Spencer), Namgoong (Kang-ho Song), Andrew (Ewen Bremmer), Grey (Luke Pasqualino) and Yona (Ko Asung); they staged the battle while Mason (Tilda Swinton) and other Wilford’s guards try to prevent them. As the Great Curtis Revolution unfolds, secrets unravel regarding everyone’s duty to protect humanity and the sacrifices they must make. The same goes to the unsettling nature of the train and its real agenda. Crossing each car, they encounter different functions such as: Prison, Water Supply, Meat Processing, Agriculture, Education, Pool, Medical Wing, Cosmetics, Luxury, Nightclub, Drug, Command Center, and Engine till they reach the Sacred Engine. Along the way, rebels and Wilford’s guards die as the battles intensify. The whole chaos reaches a climatic moment where the Curtis tells Namgoong about the inhumanity that he witnessed and participated at the beginning of the Ark train, justifying the revolution. As such, as Curtis enters the Sacred Engine and meets with Wilford (Ed Harris), the whole agenda is revealed. As Wilford cannot live longer, he and Gilliam staged an uprising trial to ensure that the leader (Curtis) could reach the Sacred Engine and take control of it. The terrifying reality follows that the train is the world holding its very last humans, but at a cost to limit the population as well its resources. Everything seems hopeless to Curtis expect when he uncovers with Yona that child slaves are controlling the Sacred Engine with the addition that Namgoong realizes that the ice is melting after several years ensuring a new hope for life outside. Tired by the injustice that his friends suffered, Curtis causes an explosion with Yona and Namgoong that creates an avalanche, derailing and destroying the train. Yona and Timmy, Tanya’s son are the last survivors whom as they feel hopeless in an uncertain future, they see a polar bear alive confirming Namgoong’s theory. However, the film ends in an uncertain future of a desolated and near extinct humanity.

This complex film tackles two main issues: Climate Change and Social Hierarchies. These are accompanied by slavery, inequality, debauchery, exploitation, power, balance, capitalism and survival. At the beginning, Mason states to the tail car people that they are the shoe and she is the head which clearly explains the class separation between the tail and the front. The tail car people are slaves to the front car people luxurious lifestyle while the tail people die by abuse. Another key moment occurs during a conversation between Gilliam and Curtis as Gilliam tells Curtis to cut Wilford’s mouth once he reaches the front overshadowing the terrible truth of the train’s purpose. In the climax key moment where Curtis tells his background story to Namgoong, he reveals the cannibalization that occurred in the tail car due to overpopulation at the beginning of the freeze apocalypse. He confesses to almost killing a baby Edgar as food while Gilliam stopped him and offered like many other people their limbs as food, a brutal trade. The final key moment that catapults the fate of the train and humanity is when Curtis discovers that Tanya and Andrew’s children are used as slaves to operate the Sacred Engine since they become replacements of extinct mechanical parts of the engine. Shocked by the purpose of his revolution and the lives that are staked in ensuring humanity’s survival, Curtis understands that a selected group of people must be sacrifice and brutalized to served the greater good which mostly favors the debauchery people of the front cars. In a heated decision, Curtis opts for a better chance in saving humanity without succumbing to human abuse. Thus, helping Namgoong and Yona in procuring the destruction of the train.

The rest of the tail car people are extremely diverse with the only similarity that they are poorer and serve as tools for commodity to the front people. The front people are also divided as Wilford stated, everyone has a role to the train. There are people who have to work on food, medicine and education while others live in constant luxury. Wilford perfectly states that even though there are extreme differences among the tail and the front people, in the end everyone is stuck at the train forever. During the education section, a propaganda video explains Wilford’s childhood to his involvement in saving humanity by building the train as the world is threatened by climate change. His intentions started well but descended into a reflection of social hierarchy that spans since the beginning of humanity and ends in the same struggles that the first humans came to see. The film also details the costs of humanity’s failures to address climate change, still resonating daily to this day. The same applies with inequality and human rights abuses. Snowpiercer perfectly explains in such grotesque and existentialist way humanity’s role in the world and their lasting effects towards each other. More so than a TV adaptation is underway which might expand on the story and focus on other issues not just on the train but also to the world. Even though Snowpiercer is a science fiction film; unfortunately, it is becoming more real due to climate change and social issues which are taking the forefront of today’s problems. Thus, this 2010s movie serves as a perfect reminder of a future that we don’t want to see but must address sooner.
