Hacker Cinema
Snowpiercer
설국열차
2013 · Film · 127 min
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
In a future where a failed global-warming experiment kills off most life on the planet, a class system evolves aboard the Snowpiercer; a train that travels around the globe via a perpetual-motion engine.
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52 comments on Hacker News
"""I have an idea for a movie club, where two movies with a tenuously connected theme are watched (separately) and then discussed. If you've seen the movies "XXX", and "YYY", tell me what is similar about them, what's different, what are some possible "connected themes" and who tackled the topic better?"""
...time passes...
"""Now that you understand the idea behind these pairings, recommend five more pairings, but don't give any hints as to their connections, just five bullet points with "A vs B" movie titles. Bonus points if there is at least a 10-year gap between them, and they are both not box-office blockbusters (but make sure they are slightly more popular or recognizable movies, not exclusively low-distribution non-critically-acclaimed indie movies)."""
* Children of Men vs Snowpiercer * Lost in Translation vs Frances Ha * No Country for Old Men vs Hell or High Water * The Prestige vs The Illusionist * Drive vs Nightcrawler
...I know guidance is "don't just post AI output", but this is specifically a human-to-human discussion around novel(?) ways to interact with AI/LLM's. I've found they're _really_ good at conceptual-venn-diagrams.
There's a book "Algorithms to Live By" (ie: look for matching socks via BFS/DFS or whatever). Asking the AI: "you know a bunch of algorithms, what are the top three that should have been in the book?" => "what are the weakest that could have been removed?"
Recently during performance reviews, we had to write our self-assessment and had guidance from on high like: "make sure you talk about people skills, technical skills, customer impact, etc." ...so yada yada: "I'm so amazing, I'm so great" => "Dear AI, I've been given this guidance `...`, please compare my handcrafted storytelling against the guidance `...` and tell me where I have missed covering a requirement" => "...now please give help w.r.t. simplifying or cleaning up the section on $INCREDIBLE_TECHNICAL_ACHIEVEMENT b/c I was focusing on describing my personal impact, but need help making it more digestible for others".
The combination of instant, tailored feedback and the fact that they've read the whole internet, "watched" every movie (read the script, read critics reviews, reddit, forum discussions, etc), read most published books, and that they're 80%+ plumbers, doctors, lawyers, car mechanics, etc. make them an unstoppable research assistant, especially when crossing connections that would normally be "expensive" to do so.
Example: ask a [doctor+lawyer+plumber] about the health and legal impacts of lead solder in pipes or whatever. Instead of needing to schedule 3 people's times, wait for them, pay them, etc, you can get instant "free" feedback, educate yourself, and then have a more solid foundation to branch out from there. Such incredibly useful tools!
Yeah I think _a_ future of television might've been more apt. They should've made a season 5 to Snowpiercer.
Some of my favorites (no particular order):
- The Martian
- Arrival
- Snowpiercer
- Annihilation (a bit scary in some parts, but not really horror overall)
- The Congress
- Ex Machina
- Her
- Children of Men
- Blade Runner & the new Blade Runner
- Gattaca
- District 9
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Elysium
- Terminator 1 & 2
- Upgrade
- Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- Mad Max (new one) and Fury Road
On the cheesier side:
- Demolition Man
- Judge Dredd (both the original and the new one)
- Terminator 3 and beyond
- Matrix movies
Grand vistas but slow and sometimes boring, and often haughty / overbearing:
- The new Dune movies
- 2001: A Space Odyssey and its sequel (some other number, like 2010 or something, can't remember)
- Interstellar
- Inception
------
Of all of those, my top 3 would be the first three (Martian, Arrival, Snowpiercer).
> What about meaning?
What about it? Do you seek a deeper meaning in every film you watch and every book you read? Sometimes trashy action is perfectly fine. There are plenty of narrative games too, if that's your cup of tea (not mine).
That old desert shooter Spec Ops: The Line was based on the Heart of Darkness book, for example, and BioShock is basically Atlas Shrugged. I'm sure there are newer, deeper titles, but it's not my genre of choice. Frostpunk 2 is a city builder where everything goes to shit all the time, and it's a bit like watching Snowpiercer in that sort of bleak apocalyptic way.
> Is there any reason a busy adult should be playing any games?
It can be a nice break from work and social activities. They can be fun, social, addicting, relaxing, whatever.
> Is the technology exciting anymore?
Is web technology exciting? Film and camera tech? Any tech? Anything?
Gaming is just a mature industry now, with small incremental gains instead of huge leaps, along with a busy indie scene (the COVID bubble bursting and mass layoffs really hurt that, though).
> What is an exciting new game?
What do you like in a game, if anything? If nothing, maybe gaming just isn't for you. Nothing wrong with that.
Personally, I grew tired of single-player narrative games a while ago, but Baldur's Gate 3 is an excellent title by any metric. And you can play through it without focusing on the story if you wish. I skipped every cutscene and killed everyone and still had a blast.
Been on an action RPG kick lately, between Diablo IV, Path of Exile, and Last Epoch. It's not a dramatically different experience than the first few Diablos way back when, but the builds these days are a lot more interesting. The designers have really gotten the complex synergies between items, skills, and passives down these days, but it's a lot of time investment and watching things blow up.
I also really enjoy factory games, and the recent Shapez 2 is a lot of fun if you like basic programming concepts and optimizing pipelines and parallelization, etc.
Meanwhile my partner loves digital board games like Wingspan, and she's been trying to get into BG3 as well (which is also kinda a digital board game, I guess).
My friends are often playing MOBAs.
Choose your poison. Or don't. Outside is nice too :) But the gaming industry is producing a lot of great works these days, if a bit oversaturated and repetitive.
And back into fiction, Snowpiercer is a movie about a linear city on a train.
I believe this was the plot of the movie Snowpiercer.
I would be a bit worried about accidental side effects; atmospheric alteration on a large scale seems like a dangerous game.
Or the film Snowpiercer (based on a French graphic novel).
This was basically the plot of that movie Snowpiercer; we accidentally geoengineer a second ice age.
This is not even close to the scientific consensus on climate change. It’s just as unscientific and counterproductive as the drivel repeated by climate denialists. Climate Doomerism is just another kind of denialism, in effect.
But even if that were true, who says you can’t drive trains in a climate catastrophe? There’s a whole movie on the topic. ;) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer
The 2010s in sci-fi gaves us:
- Dredd
- Melancholia (may not qualify for some sci-fi fans, I suppose, and I can understand why—it's so very allegorical)
- High Life
- Under the Skin
- Annihilation
- Ex Machina
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- Blade Runner 2049
- Sorry to Bother You
- Arrival
- Mad Max: Fury Road
- The Last Jedi (I know lots of people hated it—I think it's the only more-or-less good Star Wars movie since the original trilogy, and was shocked at the broadly-negative reaction, having come out of the theater thinking "finally, we got a good one, even if it did play the ending way too safe; everyone's going to be so happy!". We're not gonna change each other's minds in HN comments. Agree to disagree.)
And that's just the ones I've seen and thought were somewhere between good and great. And that I could remember or quickly find a reminder of with a quick search. I hear very good things about the new Planet of the Apes series (like, "each entry is better than the last" good) but have only seen the first one. Lots of people liked Rogue One, Snowpiercer, Ad Astra, and Interstellar (I didn't, or at least didn't think they were notably good, but hey, lots of people did). Godzilla, Pacific Rim, and Kong were OK romps. Heard good things about Upgrade and Attack the Block, but haven't seen them. The Martian was OK (some loved it). Inception was alright (again, lots of others like it way more than I do).
How many really good sci-fi movies did the 70s produce? The 80s? I think we're doing fine.
> The elephant in the room here is the obsession western TV now has with being woke.
The biggest Korean series on Netflix is absurdly "woke": I don't know how one could watch Squid Game and miss how critical it is of capitalism. I also find most movies by Bong Joon-ho to be similarly "woke" - not at the periphery, but as a central theme of the work - for instance Snowpiercer, Parasite and Okja, and they are hits in Korea and abroad.
Meta commentary: your appreciation for diverse types of movies (and not just the same-old bland Hollywood ones) is pretty woke too!
If this isn't a reference to "Snowpiercer", then you should really give it a watch. The movie I mean; I haven't seen the TV series.
Okay, new book added to my reading list.
The book reminds me of the movie Moon from 2009 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_(2009_film)) that had clone workers with limited life span. Really great story and execution, even though low budget.
After Snowpiercer, I'll watch anything Bong will do. I am sure it will be really great.
Ever seen the movie Snowpiercer? It was based on a comic called Le Transperceneige and they also more recently made a TV series about it, but I've only seen the movie and highly recommend it. It takes place on an Earth stuck in a planet-wide heavy winter due to an anti-global-warming scheme gone wrong. It's the first thing I think of whenever I hear of space umbrellas or these sorts of anti-warming ideas.
EDIT: Ah, someone sniped me.
Reminds me of the movie Snowpiercer in reverse: desert instead of snow, static instead of moving. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer
> Snowpiercer: Gave up after the main plot focused on maintaining a lie, not discovering a truth (conventional screenwriting).
What do you mean by this? The "geo-engineering backfired and made the world too cold" setting of the story? I found the movie schlocky and ham-fisted, but generally entertaining in a dumb-movie sort of way. I'm not sure what you mean by maintaining a lie and discovering truth.
There is a movie about this called snowpiercer.
I think that was what the movie Snowpiercer was about. It ended badly before the start of the movie, with an ice age.
I think many people don't reflect on the show's messaging beyond the surface level "catchy costumes and violence in a game show" aspect (which honestly wasn't even new when Arnold Schwarzenegger portrayed it in Running Man).
The social critique of Squid Game isn't the squid game. It's the world outside the game. It's why so many of the participants not only volunteer but also volunteer to come back after having already experienced it. The world outside the game show is portrayed as so bleak that hundreds of people would rather compete in a life-or-death "game" that promises fairness and a life-changing cash reward.
And the critical message of the show is that this world outside the game is not significantly different from ours. The game is a grotesque exaggeration of a get rich quick scheme but there are plenty of examples for people hoping to beat the odds or being willing to scam others for promises of great fortunes (look no further than the way the GameStock pump and dump was framed as a proletarian revolution until it was revealed most of the stock movement was the result of established investors jumping in to cash out on the gullible masses still tweeting "diamond hands" memes as the tide was starting to turn).
The cheap gore horror sells the show, but the implications of the story it tells, what people are willing to do to themselves and others for the promise of a carefree life, and how characters from all walks of life can end up in the gutter and devoid of hope, is why people dig their claws into it for more than just a few viral marketing memes. It speaks to the zeitgeist, especially during a pandemic that has repeatedly demonstrated failures of government and society, and economical interests being placed above the individual's well-being.
Before 2020 many people likely believed that their country would come together in a crisis like this, that people with power would forego their own interests for once an help out or that the wealthy wouldn't do less than even the bare minimum to contribute to the society that made them rich. In 2021 I don't think there are many people left having any such illusions about the systems they exist within.
So yeah, detached rich people betting on the dying and desperate like horses in a race strikes a chord with people right now. A show casually presenting a social reality in which poor people are willing to participate in such a "game" even more so. Note that this show's success on Netflix followed both The Platform and Snowpiercer (or the serialization thereof) as well as Parasite and Knives Out. There's a common thread between the themes of these films and Squid Game managed to strike the nerve.
Maybe all these snowpiercer, squid games, parasite narratives are having an effect? Its like all these dystopic, zombie, monster, battle royale movies and shows are just expressing the never ending exploitaion and helplessness around people.
I'm patiently waiting for the west to realize that insects are the future of protein. I will gladly munch down a handful of crickets, even before they're prepared to look appetizing. "Beyond" and "Impossible" meats, lab grown meats, and black bean patties are neat projects, but not the future. And movies like Snowpiercer that shows the horror of flavorful, nutritious, and sustainable bars of crickets (edit: cockroaches) really aren't helping.
It's a good idea to not form opinions about science from Hollywood movies.
Snowpiercer itself arguably doesn't hold an opinion about stratospheric injection of aerosols because it's used as a setting for an allegory.
Sounds like the precursor idea to Snowpiercer. Then again, I can easily see Jeff Bezos operating a train like that in the movie, so maybe it was less fiction than I thought.
Yeah, I think I saw this movie. Snowpiercer.
Snowpiercer
Most people see this movie as a very on-the-nose example of class struggle. But I see it as a commentary on how we humans build and interact with the very system that we collectively create to sustain ourselves as a species. The system always has its apologists, supporters and opposition, but deep down all but the most extreme zealots understand that the system has to change with time or fail, and the longer it takes for change to occur, the worse the inevitable failure will be. It ties in nicely with what Nassim Taleb says about fragility of rigid systems.
In the movie the system is represented by the train and its architect. All people on the train are grateful for what the train has provided them: safety from certain death outside. The poor at the back of the train are constantly threatened and preached to by the train loyalists how important it is for everything to stay as it is, that the train is eternal and will be there forever as long as they obey and believe. But as it becomes apparent that the loyalists are lying and things don't seem all that rosy with the train, the poor start to push forward, for information, and ultimately, change. As they go forward in the train they discover that the wealthy passengers have fallen into either hypernormalisation or a drug fueled apathy. They either believe so much in the train that they can't see how it could ever fail, or they know that it will inevitably fail but have given up hope to do anythin about it - perhaps facilitated by their own relative comfort (why jeopardize such comfort for an uncertain, risky change?).
After watching the movie, it struck me how we're perpetually living in an unsustainable system, but we avoid the abyss by constantly changing from one unsustainable system to another.
Have you seen the movie Snowpiercer?
The preamble of the movie Snowpiercer describes a the release of a chemical into the atmosphere, in an effort to combat global warming, which results in runaway rapid cooling that plunges the entire world into an eternal Ice Age.
So now life is imitates the movies (I need more popcorn!!)
I think the movie is Snowpiercer? Great movie by the way.
Anyone seen the movie Snowpiercer?
Snowpiercer
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
Ecological dystopia...on a train.
Has some plot holes, but original story with great action sequences.
The world in the movie was quite devoid of animal farming / husbandry.
As an aside Snowpiercer had a related concept - grinding cockroaches to make protein bars...
Have you learned nothing from the movie "Snowpiercer"?
The global disaster in that movie was a plausible plot concept. Humanity is already talking about geo-engineering concepts based on aerosols to reflect sunlight. The Snowpiercer universe just kinda took the 'Ice 9' from Vonnegut's "Cat's Cradle" book and used it for geo-engineering.
If we had that kind of technology, we would probably consider it with similar disasterous results.
Technology that impacts the entire planet, wielded by a desperate species, can have disasterous consequences if things go wrong.
Lucky for us, a form of ice that is stable and has a higher melting point isn't a thing in our world...
Us genetically engineering hardy organisms to terraform our way out of the climate crisis is the more plausible 'oops' scenario. All it takes is one project underestimating the results of their work for things to go wildly wrong.
The "God will save us" was not a dig against Christianity as a whole. I'm not a foaming-at-the-mouth God-is-terrible atheist. I just suspect that the reason people can continue to ignore climate change is due to an assumption that somebody will save us. For some, it's God. For other's it's a C Clarke-ian scientific magic. I actually attribute fiction to a certain extent. There's (understandably) not a whole lot of fiction that deals with an utter extinction of the human race^[1]. Even disaster movies end with the protagonist alive. What especially doesn't help is that there's a degree of romanticism in being the survivors. And everybody loves to imagine they'll be the ones to live.
^[1] Arguably Snowpiercer but people still interpret the ending in an optimistic fashion
Reminds me of the movie Snowpiercer[1]. The "protein blocks" served to the population are made from ground-up cockroaches.
The setting is on a train during an ice-age so they really need to make use of the space efficiently. They don't really go into what the cockroaches eat, I can only assume waste from the population.
1. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620/
> Even in film the convention is that if you're character is going back, standing in the way of another character moving the plot forward, or just feeling weak or uncertain, they should face the left.
Related to your comment, even if unrelated to the theme as a whole: “Snowpiercer - Left or Right”[1]. A video essay by Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos. Unfortunately they’ve stopped that series[2]; it was easily one of my favourite things on the internet. Off the top of my head I’ll recommend “Jackie Chan - How to Do Action Comedy”[3], “Edgar Wright - How to Do Visual Comedy”[4], and “Memories of Murder (2003) - Ensemble Staging”[5].
[1]: https://vimeo.com/110329961
[2]: https://vimeo.com/tonyzhou
[3]: https://vimeo.com/113439313
[4]: https://vimeo.com/96558506
[5]: https://vimeo.com/149936243
This reminds me of the movie Snowpiercer
The lack of vehicles for SF delivery have at times impeded literary acceptance and broader adoption -- take H.P. Lovecraft for instance, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._P._Lovecraft#Literary
Format adaptations have catapulted some great SF into the pop culture stardom:
The War of the Worlds was published in 1898, and though looked upon favorably, it is rarely mentioned today without also mentioning the 1938 radio broadcast.
The Wizard of Oz (Baum 1900) is more famous for its 1939 film.
In more modern times, Johnny Mnemonic (1995 film from "Burning Chrome", Gibson 1986), Snowpiercer (2013 film from "Le Transperceneige", Lob and Rochette 1982), and The Martian (2015 film from "The Martian", Weir 2011) have all increased SF visibility through film adaptations.
Without format shift, would general SF readers have pursued these works independent from the film? Probably. Would these works have entered pop culture and have been sought by the everyman, even the ones who don't routinely buy books or enjoy reading? Less likely.
I would be a little scared that some like Snowpiercer movie would happen. The Earth would be permanently cooled and we would not be able to reverse it.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620/
Man produces CO2.
Global warming.
Man produces CO2-eating organism.
Global cooling.
Snowball Earth? [1]
Wasn't there a campy French-Korean movie about this with Captain America in it? [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowball_Earth
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowpiercer
Snowpiercer was a brilliant movie. Not the plot, that didn't really matter. And of course there's a lot of rather implausible things going on. But the cinematography, the choreography, the directing, were all fantastic. The axe battle scene in specific was a great homage to Korean films (there's some film in specific it draws from, but I'm forgetting on the name), which makes sense as the directory, Joon-ho Bong, is Korean. The acting was pretty good too, I especially loved Tilda Swinton.
There's also arguments to be made about the philosophical message of Snowpiercer, but I don't think that's particularly relevant to why the movie is great (though obviously others disagree).
Of course "the Room" was worse, by a long mile, but it was enjoyable. I have long been a connoisseur of "bad movies". Look for movies like "Hillbillies in a Haunted House" or "Rock and Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape" or one of my all time favorites "Poor White Trash II" (originally titled "Scum of the Earth"). "The Room" had many (unintentionally) funny scenes. "Snowpiercer" was not bad enough to be entertaining, so instead I found it turgid, overwrought, melodramatic, and extremely implausible.
The point is though that this is a question of taste. Maybe my tastes simply aren't aligned with what a lot of other people like. But it is for that reason that I simply don't trust RT. For many things I used to use Ebert, since I could usually predict from his review wether I'd like it.
(I havent looked closely but I do wonder if selection bias impacts review sites. If a limited appeal movie comes out, and the mainstream reviewers ignore it, and all the reviewers that RT aggregates are from the world that the move does appeal to, does it end up scoring much better than if all the mainstream usual suspects had reviewed it.)
I usually base it on the movie's stars, theme or genre, then read up its synopsis (short movie description on imdb or theater's website), and if it's less likely to have some kind of twist or I don't mind spoilers at the time, then I'll watch the trailer.
I'm also not really picky, so don't mind giving a movie a try without knowing anything about it in advance (Dancer In The Dark, Oldboy, and Snowpiercer come to mind as wonderful surprises, for example).
I think engineering and or technically minded movie goers find Snowpiercer a lot harder to enjoy than maybe a critic who can discount such issues and focus on plot themes and movie making. There is so much that doesn't add up when you try to imagine how the people on the train solved all the problems they would have faced. It can make films harder to enjoy when you can't pretend that technology is just magic.
There are a lot of very interesting themes in the story though, the action is well done, the production quality is high, and the movie pays homage in tone and style to other great movies. When a movie's technobabble is terrible, it helps to pretend it's fantasy. If you don't and you let bad science get you down you could miss out on the other parts.
Apparently these guys have never watched the movie Snowpiercer...
I used to love iTunes back in the 10.3/10.4 days, but now it just feels too bloated to me. It seems like Apple has tried to do too much with the program over the years and now is the quintessential jack of all trades, master of none. The entire iTunes/App store experience is really confusing to me. For example, I tried to rent Snowpiercer before it was out on Netflix, and the process was painstakingly long and confusing. Having to wait to download the entire HD movie before being able to view it didn't help anything either...
The problem I've found is the algorithms for detecting taste seem to struggle greatly the further ones taste deviates from the norm. I find Netflix's recommendations to be fundamentally useless and is always reccomending things in which I have zero interest. But I've also found Rotten Tomatoes to be borderline useless as well (the second worst film I've seen in the last decade--Snowpiercer--has a very high RT score...go figure.)
Reminds me of the movie Snowpiercer, where there is a scene with an industrial size device that creates protein bars from insects.
Reminds me of the film Snowpiercer.
This is fantastic. Discovered a movie in about 40 seconds :) I watch a lot of movies so it occasionally gets a bit rough having to dig around for new stuff and movies I've missed. Went straight for the SciFi and found a Korean film "Snowpiercer" I had never heard of, then saw the list of related movies down below. Great stuff, if they add an "Anime" films category I'd be in heaven.
Snowpiercer has been widely released already. it's one of those movies that struggled to find distribution and went to DVD and streaming before it hit most theatres. it's been on available on torrents for almost half a year now.
This feature is several years old, IIRC?
Some of these movies seem quite new. Snowpiercer is still in theaters I believe.