Snowpiercer (Bong Joon Ho 2013)

and so anyway it turns out that the best thing about Snowpiercer (2013) is not the endless arguments about how implausible it is that those two kids could survive in the snowy landscape after the crash as if the ecology of the metaphorical train they have been riding for the last seventeen years made any kind of rational sense, nor is it Tilda Swinton’s decision to play the villainous Mason as some kind of bizarre cross between Janet Street-Porter and Mary Whitehouse (and pull it off), nor is it John Hurt’s half-assed Long John Silver look, but the way in which Bong carries over dystopian elements of our present world into the post-apocalypse, so that – having survived the end of the world – Olivia Spencer’s Tanya, the main black character, is still killed by a white cop, and so that the middle classes still feel free to go to the back of the train and bray their nonsense at the top of their irritating voices as if the rules and etiquette of the quiet carriage somehow do not apply to them…