We watched Snowpiercer last night. It got good reviews – a lot of good reviews – and it features a lot of good actors. Turned out to be a muddled mess of a movie, though.

Set in the not-too-distant future after an attempt to control global warming goes wrong and plunges the planet into a deep-freeze, Snowpiercer zooms in on what are presumably the only survivors of the climatic catastrophe, a couple hundred people locked inside a train that’s been careening along unmaintained tracks at hundreds of miles per hour for eighteen years.

Still interested?

The most pure-hearted of the survivors live in the cars at the back of the train. You can tell they’re the nicest people because they wear raggedy clothes, live in squalor and eat greasy-looking “protein bars” that the evil people in the front of the train, who wear fine clothes and lock the door as they go, deliver to the ruffians every so often under armed guard. Pretty subtle imagery, eh?

The people at the back of the train naturally resent being kept out of the front, being fed slimy goo, and having jackbooted thugs wave guns at them, so they revolt. They’ve done this before and they’ve been cut down in their tracks before, but this time they’ve apparently got a fool-proof plan that will get them all the way to the front of the train so they can take over and make everything better.

I’m guessing that the people up front, as evil as they may be, know how to keep the lights lit, the heat on and the train moving, and I’m also guessing that nobody in the back end knows how to do that, so taking over the front of the train really doesn’t do the rebels much good, but never mind. Minor plot hole. Pay it no heed.

Tangential thought: Why is the train moving at all? Seems to me that if you’ve got one of the few shelters on earth that’s impervious to the cold and has an apparently limitless source of energy, you’d just park that thing so you won’t have to fret about running off the tracks or getting buried in a snowdrift. But that’s probably a stupid idea. For some reason. Minor plot hole. Pay it no heed.

The rest of the movie is a video game: In each new scene, the rebels open the door to the next car where they have to solve a mystery or meet and overcome a foe that’s seemingly impossible to beat. One car is a single open room where row after row of six-foot-tall axe-wielding jackbooted thugs wearing kevlar vests wait for the ruffians. Hmmm. Wonder who wins, the evil thugs or the pure-hearted ruffians? Tough call.

I experienced a brief flash of hope in the first ten or fifteen minutes, about midway through a stern talking-to Tilda Swinton gave that I couldn’t help smirking over, that maybe, instead of a gloomily serious movie about a dystopian future, this was going to be a whacky comedy. The scene continued with comedic touches but, alas, the movie soon slipped back into gloom and dystopia, so I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a comedy. Everybody in the movie, with the exception of Alison Pill and maybe Ed Harris, was pretty damned earnest, especially Chris Evans. Wow, can that man furrow his brow. So I’m going to have to go with gloomily serious movie about a dystopian future, and I’m going to have to stay with muddled mess. See it at your peril.