Tuesday, July 29, 2014

Snowpiercer

GNOSTICISM WATCH: How an Obscure 2nd Century Christian Heresy Influenced Snowpiercer (Michael M. Hughes, io9).
Wilford, the creator of the eponymous Snowpiercer in Bong Joon-ho's visionary science fiction epic, has fabricated our world in microcosm. It's an enormous, interconnected ecosystem that — because of its function as an ark for the all that remains of humanity —truly is their only world (young Timmy calls it "the whole wide train"). Snowpiercer flips the Gnostic model of the cosmos sideways, however, and instead of moving vertically from the lower material world to the higher, more exalted spiritual realm, the tail-enders' quest takes them horizontally from the Dickensian hell of the caboose to the rarified heaven of the eternal engine.
Sounds like an interesting movie.

More on Gnosticism's influence on films and in other modern contexts here, here, and here, and links