Snowpiercer: Determinism and the Self-Serving Hero
The frozen wasteland that once was earth is the reality of the world of Snowpiercer. The chemical known as CW7, claimed to be a solution to global warming and created/manufactured by humans, was what brought the frozen wasteland to fruition in the year 2014. That it was humanity that brought on the ice age on as an effort to reduce earth temperatures introduces the prevailing idea of determinism in the film: humans were so determined to ‘save’ the planet that they were the ones who doomed it. This theme is consistently repeated over the course of two hours as Bong Joon-ho gives us the character of Curtis, a rear-train dweller, and threads his life through the needle of determinism by the will of the ‘benevolent’ Wilford, the creator of the eternal engine that powers the Snowpiercer train, and the man that lives …show more content…
Given no food or water, they began to eat the weak, Curtis being chief among them and nearly murdering a child in its mother’s arms for meat. Curtis’ character history displays an important characteristic of the film: there are no real heroes in a world like Snowpiercer. Every character has sold part of themselves to survive. That’s the premise of every apocalyptic movie, to see how humanity survives in a setting that is unprecedented. Whether it be engaging in cannibalism (like Curtis) or faking revolutions to kill passengers and keep the population under control (like Wilford), humans sacrifice their humanity in order to survive. Mick Broderick writes in Crisis Cinema about the, “relentless and preordained cosmic scheme which exerts force onto … its players,” (257) just as Curtis is being controlled by his own conscious and by Wilford, who realizes Curtis’ guilt and exploits Curtis’ self-serving nature for his own
The frozen wasteland that once was earth is the reality of the world of Snowpiercer. The chemical known as CW7, claimed to be a solution to global warming and created/manufactured by humans, was what brought the frozen wasteland to fruition in the year 2014. That it was humanity that brought on the ice age on as an effort to reduce earth temperatures introduces the prevailing idea of determinism in the film: humans were so determined to ‘save’ the planet that they were the ones who doomed it. This theme is consistently repeated over the course of two hours as Bong Joon-ho gives us the character of Curtis, a rear-train dweller, and threads his life through the needle of determinism by the will of the ‘benevolent’ Wilford, the creator of the eternal engine that powers the Snowpiercer train, and the man that lives …show more content…
Given no food or water, they began to eat the weak, Curtis being chief among them and nearly murdering a child in its mother’s arms for meat. Curtis’ character history displays an important characteristic of the film: there are no real heroes in a world like Snowpiercer. Every character has sold part of themselves to survive. That’s the premise of every apocalyptic movie, to see how humanity survives in a setting that is unprecedented. Whether it be engaging in cannibalism (like Curtis) or faking revolutions to kill passengers and keep the population under control (like Wilford), humans sacrifice their humanity in order to survive. Mick Broderick writes in Crisis Cinema about the, “relentless and preordained cosmic scheme which exerts force onto … its players,” (257) just as Curtis is being controlled by his own conscious and by Wilford, who realizes Curtis’ guilt and exploits Curtis’ self-serving nature for his own