I took the time to watch two movies that I had been telling myself to watch for well over a month, for some reason, I have a hard time convincing myself to watch the movies/tv shows I actually want to watch and typically make an impulse decision to watch something else that is typically bad. Alita Battle Angel and Snowpiercer, however were far from being bad or boring, they were both unique movies with excellent stories. Both stories delve into class battles and futuristic dystopia. There are some parts in both stories that take away from their true potential, but for the most part these are definitely worth watching.
The first of the two that I watched was Alita, which is a little hard to summarize. This movie takes place in 2563. In this futuristic Earth, many people are part cyborg, and it seems like there are very few that are fully human. One of the main doctors that installs these prosthetics, Dr.Dyson Ido, discovers a fallen robotic torso with the brain of teenager that had fallen from Zalem, this city that is held above the lower world. Dr. Ido is able to revive Alita and give her a new body, but once she is brought back she remembers nothing from her past and goes on a journey of discovery that results in her becoming a warrior and a motorball star. She soon finds out that there is an incredibly dangerous underworld that has the ability to thrive due to a lack of law enforcement and the endorsement of higher powers. The people with the power live up in Zalem and have all the influence, and all the people in the lower city seem to have the goal of reaching the upper city and living up there one day. The class war aspect in this movie is more of an undercurrent, but it is present. The fight scenes in this movie are incredible, and the world and story line are unlike any other. Although it is an unfamiliar Earth to viewers, the audience gets introduced to it at the same time as Alita due to her memory being wiped, so that helps add the back story.
Snowpiercer also takes place on a future Earth where to combat global warming scientists blasted a chemical into the air that accidently froze the whole Earth to a level worst than the ice age. This seems like very unsound science, I feel like the experimental process would not allow this to happen, there had to be much smaller scale experiments where people realized this is not going to work, but I digress and accept the premise. Since the world froze, a small remaining population was piled into an extravagant train, at least if the passenger had money, but it was far from extravagant for the people brought on that were previously impoverished. This brings us to the whole point of the story; it is a true class conflict. The people in the back are tired of train are tired of eating their protein jello bars, and they are ready to eat real food again and have some of life’s basic luxuries back. So Chris Evan leads a revolution, and they work through the train car by car.
So both of these movies are placed into dystopic worlds that were placed into terrible positions due to the actions of humanity, a massive war in Alita and global warming in Snowpiercer. The back story of what happened in Alita is little harder to have a full grasp on, partially due to her memory wipe, but both hold up well as potential problems that society worries about today. Bong Joon-ho, the director of Snowpiercer and recent Oscar winner for directing Parasite, does an excellent job selling the problem of class inequality. The comparison of themes between Snowpiercer and Parasite were visible through out the movie. They have vastly different stories but remarkably similar messages. These movies also have video game like feels in a positive way. All of the fight scenes in both movies, but especially in Alita feel like an immersive game where the levels progressively get harder and more intricate. Then in Snowpiercer, it is like each train car that they went to was a new level, none of them more so than when they opened the next car door and there was mass of mask wearing ax wielding villains prepared to fight.
These movies are far from perfect. For instance, in Alita the love story comes off a little too over the top. The trope makes sense a cyborg, that is mainly a robot more than human, falls in love with a guy that is completely human, at least at first, and the problems they might face. It just does not seem to fit completely right into the movie for me and takes away more from the main story than adds to it. The only other gripe I have with this movie is the lack of a back story, but I feel like this leaves the door open for a sequel.
Then with Snowpiercer, the problem is the amount of questions raised by the whole premise of the story. Joon-ho does try to explain some of the questions that arise, and obviously it could take a whole movie of its own to fully explain the self-sustainability of a train that has been running for 18 straight years, but as the viewer one can only suppress so many questions. The biggest problem I have with Snowpiercer was the ending. (spoiler warning) Chris Evans’s goal was to make it to the front of the train and take over, so his more impoverished compatriots could live better lives and not be stacked in bunks eating protein jello, but one of his allies had the goal of stopping the train and starting a new world because he believed the temperature was starting to warm back up. At the end of the movie, Namgoong was successful in “stopping” the train. The problem lies in the thinking behind this. There is no problem with trying to stop the train, but when he set the explosive to get to the outside world, it resulted in a massive crash of the train. So many of the people that they had been trying to lead to better lives died. There were many train cars that fell off a cliff and other cars were flipped and contorted. It is hard to restart society when most of the people left were killed. Next he chose the worst time to blow up the door. The movie ends with his girl and kid they saved walk out into the snow. The train came off the tracks in the middle of no where in the mountains. So the temperatures around the world may have been falling, but blowing the train of the tracks nowhere near an uninhabited city and at high elevation where it is going to be cold in normal circumstances was an insane choice. The train line goes around the world through many metropolises, and they decided to blow it up somewhere around the Ural Mountains in Russia, the country that defeats everyone in the winter. This ending just bothered me because it was supposed to signify freedom, but it seemed more to represent imminent doom.
I would recommend watching both movies. I gave them both an 87 rating, I know I raised way more problems with Snowpiercer than Alita, but the symbolism of the story added to where some of the logic was lacking. The symbolism is Alita was lacking some, but the incredible world they created was so good that it made up for it. I initially was very skeptical of Alita, but I had heard good things about it, so I took the chance to watch it, and my expectations were blown away. It seemed like a hokey idea from the commercials, but the final product was far form that. Snowpiercer I had heard was good, and once I heard that it was directed by Bong Joon-ho, I knew I had to check it out. They paired well together also. Alita is on HBO and Snowpiercer is on Netflix.
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