Snowpiercer (2013) as/and Cli-Fi

The blatantly eco-horror cli-fi film Snowpiercer (2013) emphasizes both its climate change catalyst and its human focus through its steampunk sensibility. The film’s opening shows us the consequences of climate change and the negative repercussions of treating the warming atmosphere with an experimental chemical CW7 to cool the Earth. Instead of combatting climate change, the experiment froze the planet and killed all life, according to the opening narration. Only a few humans survive on a massive climate-controlled train and are relegated into carriages by class. 

Unsurprisingly, the third-class masses like Tanya (Octavia Butler) and her children envy the first class passengers in the comfort of the opulent front. As Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir explains, “In the filthy, overcrowded rear cars where Curtis (Chris Evans), Edgar (Jamie Bell) and the cryptic, prophetic elder statesman called Gilliam (John Hurt) are confined, anger is building toward another uprising.” Set 17 years after the freeze, Snowpiercer shows us the results of such exploitation: a rebellion led by young revolutionary Curtis (Chris Evans) with sometimes devious goals.

The bulk of Snowpiercer examines this rebellion while also revealing the intricacies of the train as biosphere with every new carriage Curtis and his crew penetrate. The ultimate goal is disrupting the hierarchy by seizing the means of production—the engine that runs the train and its climate. In one car they free a drug-addicted security specialist Namgoong Minsoo (Kang-ho Song) and his daughter Yona (Ah-sung Ko). When Curtis offers him a month of the hallucinogen Kronole for every carriage door he opens, Minsoo agrees to join them. With Minsoo’s help, the rebels fight their way through a car where a sole worker cooks their insect protein blocks, a vegetable and flower garden carriage, an aquarium car where seafood is raised for the upper classes, and even an elite elementary school. The rebel group dwindles with each battle but, according to A. O. Scott, the sometimes slapstick violence “produc[es] a volatile blend of humor and horror that pays tribute to the source material while coloring its themes with the director’s distinctively perverse and humane sensibility.”

Ultimately Curtis reaches the engine at the front of the train, but the rebellion ends not in capturing control but in initiating a new beginning like that depicted in the cli-fi Noah (2014). As O’Hehir declares, “This may be the most ambitious and capacious dystopian critique since “The Matrix” 15 years ago, and it’s one that seeks to offer a hopeful and even transcendent vision.” The last scenes of Snowpiercer support this claim when Yona and Timmy climb outside the train and live to see a polar bear on a hill. In Noah, according the Noah’s vision, “water cleanses.” In Snowpiercer, that cleansing water is frozen.