Summary
Tanya goes to Curtis and asks to come with him, in hopes of being reunited with her son. Curtis tells her she cannot come, but Tanya wants to get revenge on the woman who stole her son. Suddenly an alarm starts going off and everyone in the train scrambles to get in line for the troopers. "What the fuck do we do?" Edgar whispers to Curtis, then begins yelling in protest about the protein blocks, joined by Tanya and the others.
As the passengers yell, one of the guards grabs an old man in the crowd and threatens to shoot him in the head. Gilliam questions whether Curtis is going to make a run for it, as Edgar tells him now is his chance. As the doors open, Curtis drops his protein bar and runs towards a guard who puts his gun to Curtis' head. When the guard pulls the trigger and nothing happens, Edgar yells to the others that the guns have no bullets, and chaos breaks out.
The passengers push a giant train of pipes on wheels through the next compartments, with Curtis riding on top. A huge fight breaks out between the authorities and the passengers. One of the passengers jumps atop a guard and kills him, stealing his keys in the process.
With no one suppressing them anymore, Edgar tests the different keys on a compartment, which he finally manages to open. Inside, a dazed man, Namgoong Minsu, the security expert, is sleeping in captivity. Curtis wakes him up by waving a nugget of industrial waste, a drug called Kronole, in front of the expert's nose. Namgoong Minsu sits up and looks at the crowd assembled. Curtis asks him if he assembled all of the locks and security systems on the train, but Nam is unresponsive.
Suddenly, Nam points at a small piece of technology hanging on the wall, which allows him to communicate across the language barrier. Curtis tells Nam he's going to the front and needs help getting through the doors. In exchange, Curtis says, he will give Nam a lump of his favorite drug for every door opened. Nam pulls out a cigarette case with a Fiji matchbook, and lights up a cigarette. The passengers are in awe, as cigarettes have been unavailable for over 10 years.
Impatient, Curtis asks Nam for an answer as Nam smokes silently. Finally he throws the cigarette and begins punching some of the men. Curtis grabs him and Nam opens another compartment, in which his clairvoyant daughter Yona is sleeping. Yona is also addicted to the drug, and Nam requests two lumps of it in exchange for his help.
As they open the next door, Yona tells Curtis that there is no one on the other side of the door, before asking for some of the drug. She and her father sniff the drug, before opening up the next door. Inside, the car is completely empty. Someone opens the windows and a blindingly bright light floods in. Looking out they see an abandoned city, covered in snow.
After they look out the window for a while, Curtis rallies them and tells them they have to keep moving and stay focused. They open another door and see an old acquaintance, Paul, jumping up and hanging from some pipes overhead. "That's not the Paul I remember," says Edgar, as Curtis tries to remind him who he is. The group looks at a table full of protein blocks and Curtis asks Paul what has happened to him. When he looks in a machine nearby, Curtis is horrified to see that the ingredients for making the protein blocks is a vat filled with cockroaches.
Curtis is disgusted, when suddenly he finds another capsule like the one that had Nam's name on it earlier. He asks Paul where he gets the capsules and Paul tells him he doesn't know. When Gilliam opens it, it says "Water," and Paul tells them the water supply car is a few cars up. "It's one of the most crucial sections of the train," says Gilliam, and Curtis surmises that if they take it over they can have the upper hand. "We don't even have to go to the very front. We control the water, we control the negotiation," says Gilliam.
Nam works at opening the next car, as Edgar gets increasingly impatient with how long it's taking. Curtis turns to Yona and starts talking to her; she tells him she's 17 and was born on the train. He tells her that he's 34 and spent 17 years on earth, but doesn't remember it. He asks her if she's clairvoyant, since she always knows what's on the other side of each door, and she admits that she can tell the future.
They approach the next gate and Yona has a vision, but just as she is telling Nam not to open the gate, he cracks the code and the gate opens, revealing a room full of masked men with axes and other weapons. One of the masked men holds up a fish and guts it with his axe, before handing it back. "Be careful," Curtis says to Edgar. Suddenly Curtis grabs an axe, and a chaotic fight breaks out between the masked men and the revolutionaries.
As blood splatters on the windows, Edgar fights his way through the car, with Curtis right behind him, killing many men with his axe. Suddenly, he slips on the fish from earlier and falls to the ground, but gets back up and, with Edgar's help, kills several of the masked men. At the front of the car are yet more masked men, as well as a soldier presiding over them. The men with axes begin counting down suddenly, as it happens to be New Year's Eve.
The train goes through a tunnel and crashes into several huge banks of ice on the track which jolts the train on its journey, causing everyone to fall to the ground. Yona and Nam, high off their drugs of choice, look out the window at the icy crags below. The conductor announces that they have made a safe passage, and everyone stands as Mason enters the car. Grabbing a microphone, she scolds the revolutionaries for breaking out and for being ungrateful for the fact that Wilford gave them shelter in an uninhabitable world for 18 years. She then announces that 74% of them will be killed, and Curtis throws an axe at her face, but it is shielded quickly.
"My friend, you suffer from the misplaced optimism of the doomed," Mason says, holding up binoculars as the troops prepare to attack. Yona whispers to Curtis that there's a long tunnel coming up. The car goes dark as they enter the tunnel.
Analysis
At the beginning of this section, Curtis manages to lead the revolt and escape the last car. In spite of his insistence that he is not a leader, he proves exceptionally brave when it comes to staging the revolt. He runs towards a guard pointing a gun at his head, and almost sacrifices his life. Luckily the gun has no bullets, as he suspected, and the revolt can take place. Curtis is both the brains and the bravery behind the operation, having sussed out that bullets have run out, and proving himself to be the perfect representative to break out and explore the other cars.
While Curtis is an especially brave protagonist and is more than suited to be the one to get to the front car, he is helped by a large group of associates who have expertise in various elements of his journey. Edgar is at times doubtful, but a loyal best friend. Gilliam is an older man who once was in Curtis' position and thus feels a certain paternal affection for him. Tanya encourages Curtis to break out too. Then, the dazed and drugged out Nam helps Curtis to open the doors of the train in exchange for some of his drugs of choice. A community of misfits make up the revolutionaries looking to take back the train, with Curtis as their stoic and fearless leader.
Snowpiercer imagines an uninhabitable earth, one destroyed by humans. While the good characters in the film represent the positive potential of human beings to connect, create community and take care of one another, their world is also one that is destroyed by human error, and a system of governance and sustained human life that is anything but humane. When the group gets into a neighboring car, they open the windows to see giant cities completely overtaken by snow. The earth, overtaken by an Ice Age, mirrors the coldness and starkness of human society under a fascistic system of governance.
The train in Snowpiercer is a giant allegory for the world itself and for a capitalistic society, but all through the lens of science fiction. The upper classes control everything and have a monopoly on goods and items that the poorer classes cannot have, while the poorer classes must eat food that is barely edible. In order to reclaim their lives, the members of the poorer classes must rise up and stage a revolution, in order to overthrow the upper classes and once again gain control over their own fates.
The violence in the film is brutal and explicit, matching the stark and dire plights of the revolutionaries as they fight their way towards freedom. The violence is particularly gruesome in the scene in which they must fight the masked axe-carrying men. Blood sprays as Curtis must fight his way towards the front of the car. The brutality and man-to-man nature of the fighting shows that the lower classes are more exposed to violence and brutality by virtue of their lower status, and that in order to move up in status they must succumb to terrible violence in order to fight back against the social machines that suppress them. The violence of the film is difficult to stomach, but serves the thematic purpose of explicating this struggle.
