PrimeWire

“SNOWPIERCER” ON A PLANE

60%

The usual post-apocalyptic nonsense from Caucasians which, despite being logically and melodramatically absurd, oddly remains emotionally compelling.

As always, the fictional apocalypse is seen through White people’s eyes, as if only their lives mattered. Actors of Colour behave mostly as if they were White; revealing how uninsightful White writers are regarding differing or different perspectives. The analogue-to-reality here is that the current White obsession with the end of the world in their fictional media (zombies, aliens, climate change, resource exhaustion, etc) is really a pre-occupation with the cultural and economic decline of their particular ethnic group, especially when compared with the current rise of the Han Chinese in the twenty-first century.

However, the best thing about this series is that the behaviour of the White people here is extremely accurate in terms of how strangely they would behave in such a scenario in real life. One only has to witness modern-day Caucasians in the West, panic-buying toilet paper and publicly protesting the wearing of face masks in the middle of an infectious-disease pandemic, to see this clearly.

Instead of working together to solve common problems, what we see here are people working hard to undermine each other with ego games and threats of violent assault - even when this could mean their collective deaths. There is, after all, little point in threatening the life of the only person who could save them, when no-one else could take his place in the cockpit of the plane flying them out of the danger zone.

The plot holes in this production are fairly large and include an aircraft hangar situated dangerously at the end of a long runway, continued electricity-generation without anyone to operate any power stations (eg, street lights still working) and some people surviving when others die for no explicable reason - including pets - when understanding how they managed to survive more than 24 hours could help the other survivors to live longer. But the actors save the day (especially Mehmet KURTULUS) as they are able to get beyond the mediocre writing to present more the writers’ intentions than what is immediately-apparent from their actual dialogue.

In fact, these performers somewhat deftly define their clearly-differentiated characters to present often-subtle depictions of human greed, stupidity, self-centredness, neurosis, self-pity, panic & self-sabotage. The only problem here is that over the six episodes of series one, few of them ever really develop enough beyond the two-dimensional writing wherein every character has a secret flaw; making it difficult for them to overcome their psychological problems except for the intervention of good luck in the form of lazily-expedient writing.