SummaryThe long-gestating series based on the 2013 film by Bong Joon Ho finds humans living on perpetually running trains for over seven years after the world froze but after so many years, class divisions have brought tensions to a breaking point.
SummaryThe long-gestating series based on the 2013 film by Bong Joon Ho finds humans living on perpetually running trains for over seven years after the world froze but after so many years, class divisions have brought tensions to a breaking point.
Instead of a more straightforward rebellion pushing Evans’ Curtis from the tail to the front of the train, the series takes advantage of its multi-chapter format to present a complex web of lies, false identities, and complicity.
What follows is a soapy, ambitious sci-fi season that takes big swings and follows through, engaging with not just class struggle but also leadership, loyalty, compromise, and coalition.
There’s a compulsively watchable (if ultimately uninventive) gumshoe show baked into TNT’s interpretation of the material, but the extras—even at their most glamorous, vivid, and licentious—overwhelm the best that “Snowpiercer” has to offer.
The fact that it lands somewhere in the slack middle of the quality scale is bound to be disappointing for fans of the film hoping for better. ... Helpfully the TV adaptation deviates enough from the film to keep viewers guessing about a few things.
A mess, full of half-developed characters, illogical plot choices and incompletely realized social satire. But it's not awful. Thanks to solid production values, maybe a half-dozen amusingly pitched performances and several moments of giddy lunacy, Snowpiercer settles into a watchable rhythm.
It’s a show that’s so overtly plot-heavy that it has no time for little things like character and setting. It just keeps pushing forward, completely unwilling to give you people to care about in this vision of the future, hoping that you’ll just go along for the ride.
Snowpiercer doesn’t even get out of the station before it goes off the rails. ... The standout performance comes from The Americans’ Alison Wright as Connelly’s second in command—she does a nice riff on Tilda Swinton’s gonzo performance from the film—but in general, the quality of the writing and acting are very basic cable, even for basic cable.