Post-Apocalyptic Movies and Descriptive Titles

There is a sub-genre in the science fiction realm dedicated to post-apocalyptic scenarios. Many films in this zone have easy crossover appeal with horror when zombies are involved, or pandemics (like The Stand; or 28 Days Later, which mixes both).

I grew up with Mad Max and the spectacular flop Waterworld. I don't remember hating Waterworld, but I do remember thinking it wasn't good enough to beat down the built-up head of steam of popular-consciousness hate that followed it from production to post- to screenings to its opening. What can you do? Aeon Flux is another one...

So, the post-apocalyptic movie I'm going to mention now is Snowpiercer. I remember reading a bit about it over the summer and had wanted to make a trip to the cinema to see it. It didn't work out, as we'd have to get all the way to Hollywood to find one of the five screens that was showing it.

It's on Netflix now. GREAT flick.

One thing that got me, and gets any other discerning viewer, is the premise. That goddamn premise. An attempt to combat global warming has gone horribly wrong and an ice age has been induced. Earth's surface is cold and dead, and the only humans left are riding around the planet on a train that is on a global track.

The story is based on a French graphic novel from 1982, and this film is directed by Joon-ho Bong, the Korean director of the great The Host, one of the gems Netflix makes available to your eyeballs.

In this story the last two cars are where the lower class lives, and maybe that should be "lives" with the quotes. They are perpetually on the brink of starvation, subsisting on black gelatinous protein bars (the contents of which you see later as a nice a reveal) and are kept in line through brutality and a religiosity that becomes more apparent as the movie progresses. As a form of punishment, Spud from Trainspotting has his arm put through a portal into the freezing night for the requisite seven minutes, and upon it's return to the inside of the car, is smashed to bits with a huge mallet.

Captain America plays the "hero" who starts the revolution and the march from the tail of the train to the front. There's so much death along the revolutionary march that it's hard to believe that survivors can really keep the gene pool deep enough...

Anyway, the cars along the way to the front get steadily more bizarre. One is a elementary school classroom where the children sing in unison about what happens if the train stops: "We all freeze and die!" they cheerily shout.

The ending makes you remember viscerally that the director is not American. But, really, if your idea of the survival of the human species is to perpetually ride a train, the game may already be lost.

Days before we watched Snowpiercer I told Corrie about it. At the end of the week she said, "Oh, we should watch that movie Snowtrain." She has an adorable habit of changing the names of movies to be more descriptive titles than actual names, especially if the name is cryptic. 

I believe it's because she simply doesn't care that much. Cowboys and Aliens, a generally lame movie but with a title that is a play on "cowboys and Indians", to Corrie becomes the more appropriately titled Cowboys vs Aliens. Movies just aren't things that for her are worth much brain power outside of the experience and our conversations about it directly after the fact. 

She sees subplots and generally what the director's up to; she understands foreshadowing and the elements that make the moving-picture experience pleasurable, she just doesn't really care that much. There's too much other real shit in the world going on to be concerned with movies.

In one minute Corrie can talk about the forced and characteristic whimsy in The Grand Budapest Hotel and relate it to a grand scheme of Wes Anderson's views on family that seem to stitch his movies together...

...and in the next minute tell someone, "Oh, we went to go see the new Star Wars movie," when in reality she's referring to Star Trek Into Darkness. For her, it's in space, there's a battle, or conflict, or something...so Space War? No that's not a thing...Star Wars, yeah, that's a thing... 

She's funny. We were just talking about it the other day: 

Me: It's like when you told Adrian about seeing Star Wars last year...

Her: Whatever. I know the difference. One has Jean-Luc and one has Luke and Leia. See? They're both in space, so...meh....

Me: (Laughing) What we went to see didn't have any of those people...

She does, though, pay attention to me when I talk about nerdy things, so she's pretty well versed on the intricacies if you pressed her. Same with sports. She knows more about A-Rod's contract status than any baseball-hating wife non-fan probably should.