Snowpiercer (Bong Joon-ho, 2013)

If you mix a French sci-fi graphic novel with a Korean director in the same field, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out what the progeny will be. Thus, there is an improbable scenario of a near-future world where the whole planet has frozen over because of a global overreaction to global warming having messed everything up, and humanity's sole survivors are on a class-segregated train travelling endlessly through the wastes. It's a very limited premise, and while actors such as Tilda Swinton, who seems to love doing demented characters and steals the show in her too-brief spell as a psychotic NHS-spectacled bureaucrat maintaining the warped status quo, or Ed Harris as the reasonable voice of evil behind her, have a field day with their roles, and the action is perfectly serviceable, it seems to add up to less than the sum of its parts. It was wildly plauded on its release, and it's hard to see what people saw in it, except that at least it tried.

5/10