Joon-ho Bong’s South Korean/American train epic based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige is strange, dark, bilingual post-Apocalyptic sci-fi. Lower class passengers of a train that’s been rattling in a circle around a dead frozen Earth wasteland for years struggle to survive until R E B E L L I O N
WTF: 4.0 out of 5.0
As they bust from train car to train car, it gets all fantasy in mind-boggling lunges. After the proto-Holocaust/slave ship-like tail, this train has a car with an aquarium, a 50s-style hair salon, a nauseating techno-Bohemian club… But the engine room… the infinite, perpetual engine… ๏_๏ And may I say the drugs are very imaginative — neither uppers, downers, or hallucinogens, more like a cosmic fuel, and there are some truly horrific reasons that people are missing limbs. And it looks amazing.
POST-ENVIRONMENTAL DISASTER DYSTOPIANISM: 2.5 out of 5.0
Even when all is dead and all is lost, there’s a corporate ghost behind the caste cult on wheels and it convulses for control. Its minions, participants and victims looped in ad infinitum and there’s nothing we can do but blow shit up, but it’s not what you expect or want in the end and it is a most sweet despair and this is what happens with an international fucking film team, something truly new, something universal.
SEQUEL, PLEASE: NOW out of NOW
I’m not reading the Wikipedia summary of the graphic novel plot. Don’t fail me, Joon-ho Bong. The rest of you can choke on your fucking Transformers IIIIII and die.
(Graphics: Michael Weinfeld) More: All Minimalist Film Reviews
