Released: May 17th 2020 (Netflix)
Number of Episodes: 10
Where to Watch: Netflix
Created by: Josh Friedman and andGraeme Manson
Starring: Jennifer Connelly, Daveed Diggs, Mickey Sumner Alison Wright, Iddo Goldberg, Susan Park, Katie McGuinness, Sam Otto, Sheila Vand, Mike O'Malley, Annalise Basso, Jaylin Fletcher, Lena Hall and Roberto Urbina
Seven years ago, director Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer became a standout hit with its unique setting and a gruelling fight towards the front. The next effort to adapt the original French novel is a TV series comprising ten episodes. It had a lot of potential for telling a different story, but the end result feels very lacklustre.
Taking place in the same setting, Snowpiercer is a train carrying the last bastion of humanity; it runs continuously, ploughing through a frozen world rendered uninhabitable by a catastrophic attempt by humanity to reverse global warming. Across over a thousand carriages, the final humans are divided up into the luxury first class at the front and the squalor of the tail at the back of the train. In this compartment of suffering, we’re introduced to Andre Leyton (Daveed Diggs), who is chosen to go up-train to solve a murder, his previous experience as a police officer serving a tool for the train’s overlords to use. As Leyton attempts to uncover the suspect, revolutionary fervour begins to build. The thematic undertones and focus on class division has mostly been washed away, replaced with something more pedestrian. Leyton is our primary perspective, though we’re often swapping back and forth between the different sections of the train as they have their own desires and opinions on the where things are arranged. This should create a more multi-layered approach to the traditional murder mystery, but instead it muddles things a bit. There isn’t enough time to sympathise with those suffering in the tail as several characters . Nor is there room to consider the. When compared to its silver screen brother, the Snowpiercer TV series is going for a less hard-line tone in the differing ways the classes are treated, but as a result, the connection we held with characters previously rings hollow. On top of all that, the first season’s final twist feels more than a bit premature, attempting to tie things in with the original film without really earning its place; at points you’ll feel that two plotlines have been jammed into the same series, when it should have focused on one consistent thread.
With the series split up between many different perspectives, that piles more pressure on the performances to deliver; things are acceptable at one moment and limited the next. Leyton’s depth is relatively well-established, his covert efforts to learn more about the train’s security from the inside driving his character. Though as things kick into high gear in the season’s latter half, he appears to retreat into steel-jawed territory, not really stopping to question his actions. The same is also true of Melanie Cavill, played by Jennifer Connolly. As the head of hospitality, she’s the de-facto leader of the train, but because the action moves away from her view, it’s tricky to empathise with the loss of her daughter. The show needed to nail down two main leads on either side of the train, but it struggles to do so. The main issue with the other characters is how shallow many of them feel; many members of the cast are there to interact with each other and little more, mostly standing around in the background when the action heats up. The ensemble cast doesn’t contribute much to the story; for example, Susan Park’s Jinju Seong, an agricultural officer on the train, does little other than form a romantic partnership with the security officer Bess (Mickey Sumner). Some characters have their predefined roles within the setting, but only a small handful are integral to the overall narrative, which harms Snowpiercer’s aspirations. In other cases, characters are put aside and not used again for a time, most notably Steven Ogg’s Pike, whose violent tendencies could have fuelled some tension with Andre. The level of investment you’ll have in the cast ultimately falls well short of its genre contemporaries.
As a modern sci-fi property, Snowpiercer has made use of mostly interior designs and minimal exterior computer effects to get across its dystopian future and the show manages a moderate recreation; the set designs are mostly well-done, showing the differences between the train classes, but the show’s reduced budget has also cost it some added detail. There’s less emphasis on how the connected carriages fuel their varying lifestyles; instead the show draws on similar iconography from the film, whether it’s a narrow classroom of stringently taught school-children or the carefully arranged eating areas of first class. Much like the narrative, the lack of originality stands out and the efforts don’t go far enough in setting it apart. The computer-generated effects used for the outside of the train is also lacking in detail, not blending well with the in-car action and dampening the overall illusion.
Snowpiercer is an undisputed sci-fi classic; but its TV counterpart, despite its occasional bouts of decent acting, stands as a pale imitation. With weak characterisation, disconnected plot threads and limited technical effects, it comes off as a project looking to play into the popularity of the source material without taking steps to form its own identity. If you’re a fan of the 2014 flick, you may be curious like I was, but this ten-episode trip isn’t really worth taking.
Rating: 2.5/5 Stars (Mediocre)
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