Bong Joon-Ho’s SNOWPIERCER was definitely one of the hot tickets of this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, although its delayed UK release may have slipped it off your radar. The reason for its cutting-room limbo appears to be the film’s distributor, the Weinstein Company, having a difference of opinion with Joon-ho as to how to edit the film for release. 

It’s the director’s cut which screened at EIFF, with a runtime of just over two hours. SNOWPIERCER is one of those thinking-outside-the-box sci-fi epics that come along every decade or so – although in this case, the film is set in a series of large boxes: namely,  train carriages. This train, powered by a fancy ‘infinity engine’, happens to be carrying the last remaining survivors on Earth. It’s not an Earth you would recognise, though. It’s a frozen, tundra-ridden Earth, in which everyone but the inhabitants of the Snowpiercer train have well and truly frozen to death. Societal structures involving the class of the different passengers on board have evolved over the decade or so the train has been rattling around the planet, to mirror the worst excesses of a capitalist society.

Swinton is a joy to hate on screen.

A northern-accented Tilda Swinton heads the train’s security force. They’re responsible for maintaining a balance in population numbers on board the train. Swinton’s character, Mason, could easily carry a spin-off prequel film. Imagine if Margaret Thatcher was actually from Barnsley or Sheffield, and apart from dismantling the unions, also liked acting in Alan Bennett plays and had just lost one of her biscuits down the back of a sofa. Yes, Mason is somewhere between Margaret Thatcher and Dame Thora Hird. She is a joy to hate on screen.

Chris Evans leads the film as head of the resistance movement. As quickly becomes apparent, life in the back carriage of the train is like life in the steerage section on the Titanic, only with more cruelty, sadism, and disgusting food. John Hurt plays a chap called Gilliam, settling into the sort of role we are getting used to seeing him play in ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE and the Doctor Who 50th Anniversary special – namely a kind of cool, steam punk, gnarly grandad figure with a mysterious past. In short, the cast assembled for SNOWPIERCER is fantastic. You’ve also got Ed Harris, Jamie Bell, Song Kang-ho, Octavia Spencer…the list goes on.

…how can a man’s arm be frozen solid, smashed to pieces, and healed within the space of a day or two?

So where does the film let itself down? In as nice a way as possible, the editing of the film is often confusing. Almost every scene is enjoyable, but the transition from one scene to the next is not always convincing. There are great bunker-under-siege sections, with imaginative cinematography to complement the concepts, but we are left wondering about certain characters’ motivations. How can you survive an inferno inside a train carriage, wearing just a fur coat for protection? How can a polar bear survive in the outside world in which we are led to believe every single living creature has frozen to death and died? And how can a man’s arm be frozen solid, smashed to pieces, and miraculously scarred over and healed all within the space of a day or two?

Despite his stretching of credulity, Bong Joon-ho is to be commended for sticking to his artistic guns and demanding a director’s cut be released to European audiences. But Harvey Weinstein’s edit just might bring the cutting and tightening needed to do the South Korean director justice.

httpvh://youtu.be/fyWfZ9866DE