{"id":13420,"date":"2020-05-19T20:45:00","date_gmt":"2020-05-19T20:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/icrowdnewswire.com\/?p=2560053"},"modified":"2020-05-19T20:45:00","modified_gmt":"2020-05-19T20:45:00","slug":"the-snowpiercer-tv-show-slows-down-a-thrilling-train-ride","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ipsnews.net\/business\/2020\/05\/19\/the-snowpiercer-tv-show-slows-down-a-thrilling-train-ride\/","title":{"rendered":"The Snowpiercer TV show slows down a thrilling train ride"},"content":{"rendered":"

 TV’s take on Bong Joon-ho’s terrific film is more Amtrak than bullet train<\/p>\n

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Snowpiercer<\/em>, Bong Joon-ho’s gripping sci-fi film, doesn’t seem like a natural fit for television. A tense post-apocalyptic story where the remnants of humanity succumb to class warfare on an endlessly running train, the movie was a finely tuned thriller that also succinctly articulated its themes. More of something isn’t always a good thing. You run the risk of diluting it, especially when the leaner medium of TV forces you to reproduce the original on a tighter budget. There are good ways to do this, but TNT’s Snowpiercer<\/em> series has found probably the most mundane way to pull it off.<\/p>\n

Ironically, the first change in Snowpiercer<\/em>’s TV adaptation, despite being a television cliché, is a really good one: making its protagonist a detective. The broad strokes are otherwise mostly the same as the 2014 film. When our climate crisis reaches an untenable state, scientists inadvertently create another one, making the planet inhospitably cold. In order to save humanity, a 1,001-car supertrain is built to endlessly circumnavigate the globe, a place for the human race to ride out the apocalypse — provided they can buy a ticket. Those who do are stratified by wealth, with the rich in luxe cars up front and the poor stowaways who forced their way aboard penned in the back, living in squalor.<\/p>\n

Layton (Daveed Diggs) is one of those “tailies,” eking out a miserable existence as his cohorts plan a revolution. Things are complicated, however, when Layton is recruited by the people in charge because he is the only passenger who was a former homicide detective, and there is a murder that needs solving — one that slowly, over the show’s first season, causes the fraught balance of the Snowpiercer population to fall apart.<\/p>\n

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Shifting the story’s perspective to a detective is a smart way to make Snowpiercer <\/em>interesting over 10 hour-long episodes. Snowpiercer<\/em> quickly shows why: Layton’s recruitment allows him to introduce viewers to the world as it’s been re-created aboard the eponymous train, drifting from car to car as the story requires. Check it out: there’s a nightclub car, a twisted morgue where troublesome individuals are put in suspended animation and stashed in drawers, a school car, suites for the first class, okay rooms for fourth class, and so on.<\/p>\n

This is where dilution starts to be a bit of a problem. Snowpiercer<\/em> wasn’t a terribly subtle film, turning the evils of capitalism into a speeding freight train that hurtles at the viewer, but every way it expounded on its sci-fi future felt vital. As a TV show, Snowpiercer<\/em> has to be about more things and show the audience more of the world in order to build a longer, serial story. Unfortunately, that longer story is a drag.<\/p>\n

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