Snowpiercer (2013): or alternate reality ecoapocalypse (barely), Ecohorror part VII

The movie Snowpiercer has a very simple premise. In it, scientists had engineered a way of reversing the effect of global warming. This method entailed the spraying of an aerosolized chemical compound high up into the atmosphere. The idea was to reduce the temperature of the world by a couple of degrees, bringing the adverse effects of climate change and global warming under control. Unfortunately, as you might expect, the aerosolized compound works way, way too well. It winds up reducing the surface temperature of the earth to approximately -120°C.

You do not need to be especially good at converting Celsius to Fahrenheit to know that that is way below any kind of survivable temperature for the vast majority of life on earth So this attempt on the part of human scientists to correct global warming has wound up producing an anthropogenic climate change catastrophe in the opposite direction, wiping out essentially all life on earth. The only humans who survive live on a high speed train that is powered by some kind of quasi magical perpetual motion engine, which provides heat and energy and forward-looking motion to the train indefinitely. The train courses around the frozen earth, on a track that is something like 48,000 kilometers length in a circle. Outside of the train, there is only cold, cold death.

Predictably, because human beings are woefully bound to hierarchical social structures, the train has devolved into a very rigid class system. The people who live in the back of the train are poor, malnourished, overcrowded, and treated as nonhumans. The middle section of the train contains a great deal of mechanical compartments, but as you move forward, you arrive in the upper middle class and aristocratic compartments. At the very head of the train is the engine room, which is occupied by a man named Wolford, who invented the perpetual motion engine some 20 years earlier. Indeed, it turns out that the world freezing catastrophe happened about 17 years ago, and that there are many people on the train who were born on the train, and have no understanding about what the world outside was like. These are called train babies. They don’t know what grass is, nor earth, nor sunshine. There are not even windows in the back of the train.

So, part of the ecohorror of this film is imagining a life with zero exposure to the natural world. Zero exposure to sunlight.

The mechanisms for maintaining this social structure are draconian. Anyone from the rear section of the train who disobeys, or rebels, or even substantially questions the authority of the people toward the front of the train is punished. In one excruciating scene they have a man stick his arm through a small vent in the side of the train, for just a few minutes. When he brings his arm back inside it is frozen solid. Those in charge smash it to smithereens with a sledgehammer. The man’s arm was changed from living tissue to bloody glass in minutes. The point of this authoritarian and sadistic demonstration is to remind all of the other people in the rear section of the train that what stands between them and certain death is only the train itself.

Nature—the outside—is an abomination, and the only possibility for life is in the technologically engineered confines of the train.

The main character of the film is a man named Curtis, played ably by Chris Evans, who is the leader of an incipient rebellion originating in the rear of the train. He and his stalwart compatriots make a plan to make their way forward in the train and to demand better circumstances for themselves and their families. To be clear, with a political rebellion plotline like this, most of the film really is an action film, and not a horror movie proper.

It is the frozen apocalyptic frame of the train story that creates the aura of horror and despair. There are many action sequences, fight scenes, gun battles, acts battles, fire battles, you name it. Some of the violence has a little bit of the flair of the original alien movie, simply because it takes place in such confined quarters, and everyone is aware that if the hull of the train is breached, everyone will die. But the actions inside the train aren’t terrifying, like in Alien. They aren’t harrowing. They’re just very active, very splashy, very violent. So, to me, in case you can’t tell, the plot is not particularly interesting.

Where the movie does get really interesting is in what I would call its theology.

Curtis and the rebels discover that in the forward sections of the train all the young children, who are immaculately dressed, well fed and happy, are going to school, and that they learn about Mr. Wolford and his perpetual motion engine literally as if Wolford is a god, and the perpetual motion engine is the universe, which gives them light and life and hope. The irony, of course, is that that is literally true. All the children chant together that if they go outside the train they will freeze and die. And indeed, they would.

This was a scene that I found especially horrifying, because watching a crop of young children, some of the last survivors of the human species on the surface of the earth, be educated to live in a constant state of fear and panic, a constant state of hyper vigilant awareness that nothing really separates them from cold annihilation, is a disquieting thought to say the least. It’s an Old Testamental type of religion, reminiscent of the ecohorror from about 2500 years ago, in the Book of Job: there’s a God on the train. His ways are inscrutable. He may arbitrarily kill people or punish people, sometimes simply as a show of his power. But it doesn’t matter, because he’s what stands between humanity and certain destruction. God says to Job Were you there when I separated the sea from the land? I am what makes it possible for there to be life. Mr. Wolford implicitly says to everyone on the train, It’s because of me that you are in here, and not out there. I am what makes it possible for there to be life.

Where the film’s theology becomes most acute and interesting, however, is not in the children's existentially dreadful classroom. Eventually, Curtis makes his way to the head of the train, and into the engine room. There, we meet Mr. Wolford, decked out in his silk pajamas, eating steak and generally chilling. Wolford is played by Ed Harris, who I guess Hollywood has decided should play the God character whenever they make a film about existential questions (I’m thinking of The Truman Show, which, if you haven’t seen it, you should see immediately.)

Ed Harris/Mr. Wolford reveals to Curtis that the train is a delicately balanced ecosystem, which requires that someone make damn sure to keep everything in balance. The population can’t be allowed to get too high, for instance, so there have to be certain carefully orchestrated culls from time to time, when the people from the rear of the train rise up and rebel against he people from the front. Indeed, Wolford discloses to Curtis that Curtis’ recently slain idol, the rear-car rebellion-leader Gwilliam, was in cahoots with Wolford for all 17 years of the train’s existence. Rather than being a noble, high-minded, self-sacrificing Christ-like figure, as he was to Curtis, it appears that Gilliam was responsible for prior rebellions precisely in order to help Wolford cull the populations of the rear cars of the train. Curtis—an idealist—is shattered. Beyond shattered. Then Wolford says he wants Curtis to replace him; this is something Wolford and Gilliam had planned. Wolford knows someone needs to run the train. Curtis appears to consider it, until he discovers that, beneath the floorboards of the engine car, there are human children, stolen from their mothers in the rear cars, who have been converted into tiny mechanics, their lives sacrificed for the good of The Train. This is too much for Curtis to bear, so he thrusts his arm into the gears of the engine, and wrenches out the little boy he sees—a boy he knows well, named Tim.

As he does this, Yona, a young woman whose father had helped the rebellion get this far, but who also secretly hoped to blow open the side of the train so that people could see if perhaps the world was warming up, gets a hold of some matches that Curtis has. She lights a huge lump of explosive that her father had been hoarding for years. In one of the most visually stunning scenes I can remember seeing on screen, the train blows up, and we see car after car careening of the tracks and down into the snowy wasteland below.

Remember, this is all of humanity that remains, so the stakes of this wager are extremely high.

And indeed, it appears that almost everyone on the train dies. But Yona and Tim survive the explosion and the massive crash. They walk out into the world, and find that the temperatures are not actually that cold. (I will note here that there’s a huge plot hole in the fact that the earlier man had his arm frozen solid in 7 minutes; hard to believe that the surface temperature of the world had risen like 120 degrees Celsius in a matter of days.) Yona and Tim, who appear to be the lone survivors of the crash, wander around in the snowy world, their eyes wide with wonder as they survey the beautiful—if still very, very snowy— landscape before them.

The last shot of the film is of a polar bear, who gazes peacefully back at Yona and Tim.

I think we’re supposed to feel happy and a bit optimistic at the end. That’s the general vibe, and how the actors have been directed to behave—like, as if there’s something to celebrate here, in their freedom.

And maybe there is. Like, maybe there are other survivors from the train crash whom we haven’t seen yet. Maybe they will all band together to share out the resources that remain in the train, like food and water. Maybe those survivors will learn to hunt, and will form a new society that lives in peace alongside the polar bears. Maybe.

But it seems much, much, much likelier that Yona and Tim will freeze to death. Because 0 degrees Celsius is still, like, way too cold for long term solo survival, as the show Alone has amply demonstrated (see prior post in this series). And these two kids—Yona is about 16, and Tim is about 5—have no survival skills of any kind. Remember: they were born on the train and have lived on the train their entire lives. Plus, the other people who were on the train are unlikely to have adequate survival skills either, assuming they lived through the crash. The upper class front-car people—who spent the film decked out in 1930s formal wear, with fancy Hunger Games-esque hair styles and eating fancy sushi—are clearly not going to make it in the cold. So maybe the people from the rear of the train will be ok? That too seems like a reach. They are malnourished, thin, weak, and sickly. Many of them are children. Many are disabled. Many are old.

Humanity is not going to be saved, even if the world warms right up to a balmy 75 degrees in another couple days. Blowing up the side of the train was definitely a gesture toward liberation, but it was also a gesture toward collective suicide. The bear, gazing impassively down at Yona and Tim, knows the score: she and her young, not they, are going to be the top predators from now on. While Tim and Yona gaze on the bear in wonder, she gazes back on them as food.

So that’s a scary ending, and a major horror hangover. But I want to circle back for a second to Ed Harris. I mean Mr. Wolford. The scariest thing about the film is him. His indifference. His calculations. His rationalism. There is not one scintilla of mercy, consideration, or equity in him. Not one droplet of compassion. For him, the remaining humans on the train are, as he says, part of a “closed ecosystem,” and so must be treated as just another resource. If the engine room needs a child as a mechanic, that child will be enslaved. If the population needs a cull, the rear-car people will be slaughtered. No mercy. Just ruthlessness. And it’s not at all clear that the movie thinks he’s incorrect. Morally wrong? Yes, absolutely. He’s the villain of the film, beyond doubt. But is he incorrect in the pragmatics of his decision rules? The film remains studiously agnostic on this point.

And that, to me, is where the really interesting thought experiment takes place. What if we were to think of the human species not as something special—elected by God or Mother Nature for all manner of special privilege—but as a limited resource that belongs to a larger ecosystem? I’m talking about going one step further than debunking anthropocentrism. Doing that usually means saying that people aren’t special or unique. But what if we were to think of our species not just as un-special as subjects and agents and top predators, but actually as necessary ingredients for the survival of the earth overall? That is, what if we’re tools necessary for the earth’s survival, important in the way that nitrogen-fixing bacteria or honeybees are?

I mean, in this film, all species have died off—except, evidently polar bears. Any animal that survives survives because it exists on the train, which has become a kind of Noah’s ark. There are fish galore, trees and plants galore—all on the train. On the train, humanity curates and cares for a microcosm of the natural world, when the external world has become a Bizarro Man version of itself.

Ok, so, what would an ecosystemic consciousness look like that really took seriously the capacity of the human species to function in synchronicity and symbiosis with the other species out there? I hope to heaven it wouldn’t look like Mr. Wolford’s fucked up and dehumanizing train.

But what could it look like? Seeing ourselves not as predators, not as having dominion over the earth, nor even really as being its stewards. But seeing ourselves as truly embedded in the ecosystems around us, the way our gut flora are embedded in our bodies? What is that kind of participation in nature?

I’ll end with a thought from Pope Francis’s wonderful work on environmental stewardship, Laudato Si. Francis said that humans tend to understand the idea of “dominion over nature” to mean “domination over nature.” That understanding, Francis said, is wrong. What dominion means is something closer to stewardship, and, for Francis, what that means—always—is a social commitment to helping the poor, and to resisting rigid class structures and the allures of massive wealth and power. Francis has died, as we all know. And I’ll tell you right now, I cried real hard when I found out. Because, of course, he was right: “dominion” should include care, should include stewardship, should include the equitable distribution of goods and resources. Dominion is much closer to a responsibility than it is to a privilege.

Snowpiercer shows us the abjection and brutality of conflating dominion with domination, even on a closed, rapidly-moving ecosystem like a high speed train.

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Announcement #1!! Summer of Horrors, aka the Eleanor’s Horrors Summer Remote Film Club, will convene over zoom for the first time on June 2nd. If you want to join, please convert to a paid subscription and drop me a note in the comments to tell me you want the zoom link!

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Annoucement #2!! My book on Horror, American history, and feminism, SCREAM WITH ME, will be published from Atria, an imprint of Simon and Schuster, in September of 2025! Please preorder here: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Scream-with-Me/Eleanor-Johnson/9781668087633

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