Snowpiercer (2013)
- Before Chris Evans was cast, several major A-list stars turned down the lead role because they felt the script was too risky.
- The original script for Snowpiercer was written over a decade before production finally began in 2013.
- The incredible score for Snowpiercer was composed in just a few weeks after the original composer dropped out.
Snowpiercer is a 2013 South Korean-Czech science fiction action film directed by Bong Joon-ho, based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige. Set in a frozen post-apocalyptic world where a failed climate engineering experiment has killed nearly all life on Earth, the film takes place aboard the Snowpiercer, a massive, perpetually moving train that circles the globe carrying the last remnants of humanity. The passengers are rigidly segregated by class — the wealthy live in luxury at the front while the impoverished masses are crammed into the squalid tail section.
Chris Evans stars as Curtis, a tail-section passenger who leads a bloody revolution from the back of the train to the front, fighting through increasingly surreal and opulent cars to confront the train's mysterious creator, Wilford, played by Ed Harris. Bong Joon-ho — years before his Parasite would win the Best Picture Academy Award — crafted one of the most inventive and politically charged science fiction films of the decade. The train's linear geography provided a natural narrative structure, with each car representing a different layer of society, and the escalating luxury encountered as the revolutionaries advanced served as a literalized metaphor for class warfare.
Tilda Swinton's performance as Minister Mason, a bureaucratic enforcer with grotesque prosthetic teeth who delivers propaganda speeches about knowing one's place in the ecosystem, was a darkly comedic highlight. Snowpiercer earned $86 million worldwide on a $40 million budget.
