snowpiercer

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620

in snowpiercer, we have a post-apocalyptic world where the world is frozen and the only people who survived are on board a train that completes a circle on its track once a year.  i am going to give you a paragraph break to let that sink in.

really?  the last bastion of humanity is a *train*? we were not able to survive anywhere else?  and if the train stops moving, everybody dies?  what kind of super train is this, anyway?  who has been maintaining the track for the last 18 YEARS?  i know a thing or two about system reliability, and let me tell you, on an earth where the environment is hostile enough to have extinguished all but a small pocket of human life, the outlier is not going to be a train, and if it is, i guarantee that it is not going to last 18 years.  also, 18 years is obviously not long enough for the herd to need to be thinned out by three quarters, especially when it has been thinned on at least two prior occasions.  unless, of course, post apocalyptic humans reproduce and mature much more quickly.  but enough of the factual nitpicking.  the facts are not there to advance the story, they are there to set up the elements that allow this story to function as a metaphor for...whatever it is a metaphor.

i absolutely detest movies that only work as metaphors.  get it straight, people.  first, the story has to make sense.  then, and only then, are you allowed to add layers.  metaphors are the challenge mode, not the top line priority.  to do otherwise is to make a metaphor where the part which is supposed to be grounded in reality is...deconstructivism or something.  you might as well light a match and blow it all to hell.

snowpiercer gets two protein bars.  i am awarding a full protein bar for chris evans's recounting of the train's early days because it was that good.