Snowpiercer

I suspect your enjoyment of Snowpiercer the TV show will depend on how much you like the core idea. You could make the case that this is grim, silly dystopian sci-fi, a comic-book idea that got out of hand. I think it’s a fabulous premise, realised here with less anger than in the film, but equal wit and imagination and the same clarity of setting.

This is a great-looking series, with just enough CGI shots taken from outside the train to remind us of the ludicrously spectacular nature of this rolling experiment, and nifty camerawork taking us from the colorful decadence of first class through the “Night Car,” a club dripping with opportunities to explore the sins of the flesh, through the “Ocean Car,” with its tanks of fish, to the dark and hopeless and suffocating world of the tailies. Daveed Diggs gives a powerful performance as Layton.

Could the show be launching a slyly subversive attack on planned economies? I thought about that for a moment, then went back to wondering what they do with all the poop. But with a smile.

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.

What “Snowpiercer” does best in early episodes is world-building. But it’s problematic for the show’s long-term prospects that the various train cars — cattle car, aquarium car, classroom car, night club car (with multiple levels and a surprising number of staircases for a train) — stir up more initial excitement than the characters or story.

Though many of its 1,001 cars are cast in a familiar mold, Snowpiercer still manages to find new ways to interrogate power structures, as well as build up steam—or rather, power the eternal engine—for a second season of quietly compelling stories. Its style might not match its ambition, but after an arduous trek, Snowpiercer mostly proves to be worth the wait.

Snowpiercer the series manages, gloriously, to bypass all that is great and almost all that is good about both of its sources of material, and turn it instead into a police procedural that just happens to be set on the aforementioned giant armoured train.

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.

While Episode 1 overexerts itself juggling multiple storylines (there’s a B-story involving a young tailie that simply vanishes for long stretches), the episodes that follow are more tightly wound as the murder case, which dominates half of the 10-episode season, takes frightful turns.

Season 1 is as about as far removed from Bong’s cinematic vision as you can get, without reaching the “so bad it’s good” level of TV that inspires mouth-agape hate-watching. The show is fine. It’s just fine. In an all-too-obvious twist, it’s exactly the kind of science-fiction drama that TNT has been making for roughly a decade.

Snowpiercer‘s middling pilot is saved by its leads. We’re intrigued to see what Manson can do with the characters and story he inherited from episode 2 on.

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.

The TV version is larger in scope, messier in execution, and bathed in a basic cable aesthetic that couldn’t be more mainstream. Even its grit has a bit of gloss on it. Still, Snowpiercer is not an entirely bad show. It’s not great, either. Really what it does is start out meh, then become more compelling from the midway point onward, which averages out to a final assessment of halfway decent.

So while insurrection boils at the back of the train, fomented by a proletariat in perpetual motion, “Snowpiercer” also becomes a police procedural. A stylish production as well, though one does have to make concessions—this “Snowpiercer” is nothing like the original, nor could it be—as well as leaps of faith and suspensions of disbelief.

TNT’s adaptation is slower and, unfortunately, somewhat convoluted.

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.

Bong’s film of this material had an equally thudding manner of carrying across its point. What is new here is the relative dullness of characters’ dialogue and backstories. It’s somewhat grounding that even in the midst of chaos, cataclysm and global reorganization around a bizarre means of conveyance, folks will still speak mainly in cliché; it’s also true enough to life. ... The result is watchable, but not much more.

While Snowpiercer is not necessarily unwatchable, but it’s certainly not easy to remain engaged from episode to episode.

Seemingly a difficult concept in the best of times, Snowpiercer becomes more problematic in the midst of a pandemic, focusing as it does on humanity's warring remnants in a post-apocalyptic world. Even adopting a charitable view of that bleak outlook, the show suffers from soapy silliness, stilted situations and a lack of narrative momentum, preventing this train from ever getting out of the station.

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.

The series transforms itself significantly in the season’s back half, and a lot of wild things happen right on top of one another (including some pretty fun action sequences, albeit nothing remotely as great as the movie’s axe fights). But asking viewers to slog through a slow, mediocre fake police show to get to what you’re really doing isn’t reasonable in Peak TV.

The action is routine, the drama tends toward the banal and sentimental, and the social symbolism of class division and technocracy, while cleverly worked out, isn’t compelling or coherent enough to tie it all together. ... Connelly’s performance as a tightly wound, fiercely competent woman bearing a crushing responsibility is so good that it’s almost enough reason to watch.

It's a clearly inferior version of something that was already great and never needed to be revisited again. But even without taking the film's existence into consideration, it lacks a certain edge that's needed to stand out.