Snowpiercer wants us to realize that perspective and having options are incredibly important in life

Sunday morning, I had the pleasure of watching the science fiction thriller Snowpiercer. I think as a film, it cements my feelings that Chris Evans is my new favorite actor. As a genre story, it fits firmly in what author L.G. Smith might call "dystopian fiction."

If you are a member of the Insecure Writer's Support Group, then you might have read L.G.'s article entitled "My Dystopian Dilemma." She writes that "According to many in the industry, dystopian is D.E.A.D." I don't know enough about what agents or publishers are looking for right now, but if "dystopian" truly is ebbing off, I think I won't miss these stories of people living in dreadful, miserable societies all that much.

Snowpiercer is truly a gripping tale. Sure, you have to swallow the possibility that to address climate change, mankind induced a global Ice Age that killed off probably 90% of the organisms that lived on Earth (by accident of course). In addition, you have to swallow the idea that mankind's only means of surviving this apocalypse was to board a high-altitude train that makes one revolution around the Earth every year. It never stops. It never runs out of fuel. And it's big enough to contain thousands upon thousands of people in a perfectly balanced ecosystem.

And therein lies the problem. "Balance" is maintained by culling humans with insidious means. One way to achieve this much needed ecological balance is to deny a whole population a food source. Trapped in an iron box with nowhere to go, it's inevitable that the strong eventually eat the weak. Putting "undercover agents" in the population to convince them to revolt is another (so that those killed in the revolution drive down the population and open up an excuse for more killing to keep the population in check). And the creativeness of the oppressors and the oppressed is as imaginative as the population of survivors.

But perhaps what I found most engaging about the film is the actual metaphor of "The Train." I suppose it's a stand-in for the rat race. To get closer to the engine room is to improve your station and standard of living. It doesn't matter who you need to kill to get there. The fact is that removing a life from the train, makes room for a person where there was otherwise no room at all.

In a way, I think the director of Snowpiercer wants us all to realize that perspective and having options for escape are incredibly important in life. There are two Japanese characters in this film, and they have a kind of perspective that everyone else seems to lack. One goes so far as to be actually clairvoyant, able to see in her head what awaits on the other side of a locked gate to yet another train car. But they too are metaphorical stand-ins for the idea that even if we must all endure a rat race of sorts, that there is always the possibility of just leaving, of stepping outside and going somewhere else. Without this option (of course) we have no choice but to become monstrous and treat each other in the worst possible way.

Maybe the decline of dystopian fiction's popularity is a good thing, because it says that people are willing to embrace hope again as a society. It may mean that we all don't feel locked into something that we can't control and that we have options. And having options lies at the very core of freedom.