I think engineering and or technically minded movie goers find Snowpiercer a lot harder to enjoy than maybe a critic who can discount such issues and focus on plot themes and movie making. There is so much that doesn't add up when you try to imagine how the people on the train solved all the problems they would have faced. It can make films harder to enjoy when you can't pretend that technology is just magic.

There are a lot of very interesting themes in the story though, the action is well done, the production quality is high, and the movie pays homage in tone and style to other great movies. When a movie's technobabble is terrible, it helps to pretend it's fantasy. If you don't and you let bad science get you down you could miss out on the other parts.

Agreed. The physical impossibility of the train is what got to me(where did all these soldiers come from? did they march through the nightclub and kindergarden wonderland cars?).

That said, it is very well produced and if you can set aside the technology aspect of it I would say it's among the better sci-fi movies in recent memory.

Essentially all fiction requires some degree of "suspension of disbelief." We all have different tolerances both in general and in specific genres where we might have more knowledge than the average person. Or we just have trouble buying a particular premise. Certainly there are films I love even though I know they depend on a setting or assumptions that are pure BS. And there are other films or TV shows that I otherwise really like but just can't really get past some particular aspect.

Actually, I kind of liked that idea, that they did march through the nightclub, etc. I mean, the rest of the movie was rather trite (though not the worst I've encountered), trying to imagine life on the train was one of the best parts for me.

I was more bothered by the silly melodrama you got at a number of points, personally ("I know that <spoilers> taste best!"). It did have some really great scenes, though. The schoolcar scene was top notch. And it was quite impressive visually.

Oh thank you thank you thank you.

Turgid nonsense. I couldn't watch past the first half hour. If I'd paid to see that at the movies I'd have been properly angry.

7.0 on IMDB and 69% on CSFD (the Czech IMDB equivalent). They both have a big number of viewers rating and a 100 point scale, I find them pretty accurate, which always baffles me given how subjective the questions "Do you like the movie" is. Although blockbusters might be overrated (like the Martian), I can always see why that is the case and the error isn't similar to "95% vs god awful".

Snowpiercer was indeed sad, but I always assumed my negativity towards it was a result of having already read Hugh Howey's (rather good) Silo Saga, which it seemed to rip off at every turn, only having shifted the X and Y axes.

I came away from it thinking that if I hadn't read the Silo Saga, I might possibly have actually enjoyed Snowpiercer, though definitely nowhere near 95%'s worth.

Snowpiercer is adapted from a French graphic novel written in 1982, so the copying may be the other way round (I've not seen/read any of them so can't comment persoanlly).

I found the first half of Wool to be very good and the rest of it readable, although just barely so. Howey is a terrible writer with interesting plot ideas. Howey has a compulsion to explicitly tell you in minute details through every other passage exactly what is on everyone's mind. The concept of using symbolism and actions to portray people seems lost to him. His sentence structure is terrible. He's saved by Wool's very interesting idea and the first chapter of Wool was admittedly very good. I read the entire series and I really think at a high level his ideas a very interesting, but he just doesn't really have the skill required to write well. I am not sure an editor would help, maybe a co-author.

I think you have it backwards. The ideas of Wool are so common in prior science fiction that authors would take them for granted, play with them. The plot is pretty much that of The Penultimate Truth. Howey succeeded because, for whatever reason, people liked his writing or he details of his version more than previous iterations of the idea.

Very possible. Not suggesting that Wool was entirely unique, but more specifically, that Snowpiercer seemed to have taken the entire idea of Wool and just shifted the axis from vertical to horizontal.

There were a LOT of copied ideas. Perhaps none of them were original to Wool, but Wool was not (to my knowledge) as much a clone of any individual work as it was the compilation of a lot of tropes.

Wow, you could not think of a single redeeming thing about Snowpiercer? And you preferred "The Room"? Now, I think you're trolling! ;-)

Of course "the Room" was worse, by a long mile, but it was enjoyable. I have long been a connoisseur of "bad movies". Look for movies like "Hillbillies in a Haunted House" or "Rock and Roll Wrestling Women vs. the Aztec Ape" or one of my all time favorites "Poor White Trash II" (originally titled "Scum of the Earth"). "The Room" had many (unintentionally) funny scenes. "Snowpiercer" was not bad enough to be entertaining, so instead I found it turgid, overwrought, melodramatic, and extremely implausible.

The point is though that this is a question of taste. Maybe my tastes simply aren't aligned with what a lot of other people like. But it is for that reason that I simply don't trust RT. For many things I used to use Ebert, since I could usually predict from his review wether I'd like it.

(I havent looked closely but I do wonder if selection bias impacts review sites. If a limited appeal movie comes out, and the mainstream reviewers ignore it, and all the reviewers that RT aggregates are from the world that the move does appeal to, does it end up scoring much better than if all the mainstream usual suspects had reviewed it.)

Snowpiercer was a brilliant movie. Not the plot, that didn't really matter. And of course there's a lot of rather implausible things going on. But the cinematography, the choreography, the directing, were all fantastic. The axe battle scene in specific was a great homage to Korean films (there's some film in specific it draws from, but I'm forgetting on the name), which makes sense as the directory, Joon-ho Bong, is Korean. The acting was pretty good too, I especially loved Tilda Swinton.

There's also arguments to be made about the philosophical message of Snowpiercer, but I don't think that's particularly relevant to why the movie is great (though obviously others disagree).

Yes! I sat through the whole thing, waiting for it to get better. Then the credits rolled, and I was baffled by the people who raved about the film.

I agree; a zero of a film. Those that like it, were impressed by some actor/actress' performance (or they had the hots for them anyway). Not by the actual movie, which was a heavy-handed fable that thudded across the screen.

Though maybe I was blinded by the nonsense, to a wonderland of interesting screencraft. But I don't think so.