SNAPSHOT
Snowpiercer is set in 2021, seven years after the world becomes a frozen wasteland and follows the remnants of humanity who inhabit a gigantic, perpetually moving train that circles the globe. The show questions class warfare, social injustice, and the politics of survival. (synopsis courtesy Wikipedia)
While everyone is currently consumed by the threat of the COVID-19 pandemic, the real ongoing issue for many people is the way in which we are destroying the environment of Earth, an act of thoughtless, short-term vandalism that is going to come back to bite us on the collective you-know-what.
In all the modelling, the predictive outcome of climate change is a seared and scorched planet but in Snowpiercer the TV series, based on the graphic novel Snowpiercer: Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob, Benjamin Legrand, and Jean-Marc Rochette, and following on from the film of the same name by Korean directing great Bong Joon-ho, we inherit a freezing cold and barren world inimical to all life including, rather unfortunately us.
In this snow-blighted scenario, billions die; the only survivors are the super rich and those brought on board to protect and cater to their every self-indulgent whim.
You might think that the near-death of the entire human race would be a sobering reminder of their own mortality and prompt some vital changes to previously class-driven reprehensible behaviour but it appears not and so as in the graphic novel and the series, humanity continues on as it always has, just in a much smaller and even more fragile environment.
It won’t end well, of course, which makes for extraordinarily clever and insightfully dramatic television, the kind that makes for perfect viewing in the midst of what has often like the end of the world.
Snowpiercer is currently screening on TNT.
I’m probably one of the few that liked the movie with Chris Evans. I’m not sure I could handle a series though. The movie was troubling enough.