SNOWPIERCER, a (mostly) English-language film by Bong Joon-ho (Memories of Murder, The Host, Mother) starring Tilda Swinton, Song Kang-ho and some other people

This was very good, I thought.

P.S. This movie is available to watch as a streaming rental, if you are into that sort of thing.

this was pretty good. there were some dumb plot holes that could have been dealt with without too much fuss. but as an action-film allegory it was pretty top notch.

btw the film has very little to do w/ the comic other than the very basic premise.

the more i think about this film the less i liked it.
sounds like they're trying to explain the very limited release as a plan to get major critical attention and then go VOD:
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/moviesnow/la-et-mn-snowpiercer-vod-and-the-future-of-film-distribution-20140710-story.html

i thought the limited release was effectively punishment for bong prevailing and getting his cut. the article quotes a studio guy as saying this isn't true, but i wouldn't be so sure.

this is a movie that really benefits from the /scale/ of a cinema, btw.

I would have thought the big screen would expose the paucity of the CG effects, but maybe they scale up well

especially the feeble train ramming through snowfalls stuff at the end

Yeh the CGI in that last trainwreck (heh) part did look a little...cartoonish?

(I watched it in 1040 HD on a v large TV)

yeah it wasn't the best CGI, but it all transpires so fast I didn't really scrutinize it.

Thinking about my complaints, I suspect part of it is my expectations were raised by all the recut foofaw so that I had some idea this was going to be a Blade Runner-style masterpiece mangled by a scared, money-centric studio, when in fact it was just an above-average SF action movie

yup

Still an interesting premise all that said!

lol you guys know studios demand recuts of about everything, let alone foreign films. sometimes the recuts are... better

lol why would you assume we don't know that

wow -- Tilda Swinton is fitfully entertaining w/out being much good, is she?

if you're constantly worried about everything having to be "tasteful", yeah

who sez I am? I love Bong's movies.

Oh I really want to see this.

Coming from the director of Memories Of Murder, The Host and Mother - how the fuck can anybody not be disappointed with this half arsed, bodge-job of a movie?

I like all four of them, sorry fella

xp i am also haunted by that question. I think in comparison to most any other big budget scifi dystopia fantasy that's come out this year, this is good enough. compared to anything bong's done, it's utterly disposable.

It disappointed me -- his worst film. Chris Evans is a large part of the problem.

I liked it enough, but thought the pacing and over long fight scenes were not great.

any ideas how i can see this in the UK?

its leaked fwiw

i think i just glanced at a torrent that said Korean DVD

subbed?

its in english and yeah it leaked a few months ago iirc

Weinstein will also be releasing "Snowpiercer" in several hundred theaters in the UK, which has less sophisticated VOD apparatus

“Snowpiercer wouldn’t, really, be worth writing about at all, except that a number of prominent critics… seem inexplicably convinced of its virtues.”

http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/babies-taste-best#

I enjoyed this well enough. A few big plotholes and inexplicable moments (what was the Andrew kid doing at the end? Why would gilliam be in cahoots with Wilford?) And the jumps in tone were indeed jarring too but it was watchable and I never got bored. Thought the soundtrack was especially good too.

Just saw this and thought it was great. Euro as FUCK, tho, with the premise being a post-apoc class system based on a train.

Didn't realize until an IMBD lookup that the Korean father/daughter team was the same pair as the The Host.

Disappointed that the Weinstein Bros didn't open the film wider; this is destined to be the other scifi flick of 2014 tht you have to evangelize to all your friends to see.

what's the first?

Edge of Tomorrow

^^^yeah saw that last night and was really srsly surprised/impressed

I still need to, thanks for the reminder

i went into it knowing that it starred cruise and had a groundhog's day premise and that was about it

Watched the first half of this last night before falling asleep. Do I need to watch the second half?

If you didn't get to the classroom scene, yes. Highlight of the film, feel free to give up if it leaves or left you unmoved.

Thanks! Clicked it on and it was iced up exactly at that scene and you are right.

Lol autocorrect. "Cued up."

All right, reading this thread beforehand helped me make it through the rest of this movie. Some good stuff here and there but not quite enough to make up for its flaws as noted by many above. Definitely would check out director's other work though.

Is it naive to think the thing would have been better if it wasn't in English?

So was Ed Harris reprising his role in The Truman Show, this time in bathrobe instead of beret?

So liked all the exteriors and agree that the classroom scene was the best and that the front of the train was better than the back. As a whole this film was unsatisfying, just couldn't suspend disbelief or stop mentally comparing it to things that covered somewhat similar territory much better such as Dark City or Inverted World. The tone ran the A-B gamut from heavy-handed to uneven.

And yeah, Cap'n Save-a-Train was a cipher.

I noticed, albeit from sketchy details on his imdb entry that Joon-ho's next project could possibly be a Gwoemul sequel. I hope that doesn't mean a bland re-make because it is one of the greatest multi-genre Comedy|Drama|Horror pics of all time and shouldn't be fucked with.

continuing the murder of cinema

So why dump such a promising movie onto VOD? Because it made economic sense. When you see a production budget for a film, roughly $40 million in this case, you need to almost double that to account for prints and advertising — the cost of rolling the film on in thousands of theaters.

By releasing the film on VOD, Radius and TWC avoided almost all of those costs. Advertising consisted of partnerships like Chris Evans welcoming San Diego hotel guests during Comic Con on the hotel VOD systems and suggesting they rent his new movie, Snowpiercer.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/dorothypomerantz/2014/09/08/what-the-economics-of-snowpiercer-say-about-the-future-of-film/

"When you see a production budget for a film, roughly $40 million in this case, you need to almost double that to account for prints and advertising"

Well it's already made 80+ million dollars in 'foreign' markets.