Critical Essay: Snowpiercer

How is Snowpiercer a transnational film?

Snowpiercer in my opinion displayed transnationalism in three different 

ways: diverse cast/characters, Korean director for American film, and the movie 

was based off of a French graphic novel Le Transperceneige.

Wikipedia defines transnationalism as “a social phenomenon and scholarly 

research agenda grown out of the heightened interconnectivity between people 

and the receding economic and social significance of boundaries among nation sates.”

Cast/Characters

In the film the audience is given no background of the characters before the

apocalyptic freeze 17 years prior. It is made very clear however that the last 

people on Earth living on the train came from all different parts of the world. Within 

the first thirty minutes of the movie three different languages were spoken.

The specific scene including the multiple languages being spoken is Minister Mason 

(Tilda Swinton) giving a seven-minute speech before freezing a man’s arm and shattering 

it with a hammer. There was English and two other languages being translated for the

“scum” people of the back of the train.

This assists the audience in understanding that people aboard the Snowpiercer did not 

all just hop on in America. The cast included huge Hollywood names (Chris Evans, 

Tilda Swinton, Ed Harris) along with various other actors of different ethnicities.

Director: Bong Joon-ho

Snowpiercer was director Bong Joon-ho’s first English language movie of his career. 

Joon-ho is from South Korea. A South Korean director making a majority English 

spoken film directly links with this film being transnational.

“The global forces that link people across nations.” (Ezra and Rowden, Transnational 

Cinema, pg. 1)

I believe the significance of having directors of different nation states create movies 

gives the movie a new twist on the repetitive Hollywood originals we watch every 

couple years concerning the social class segregation included in Snowpiercer

(ex: Hunger Games series).

This movie is considered and English film but it premiered first in Seoul, South 

Korea a couple months before its release at the Deauville American Film Festival.

Le Transperceneige

Snowpiercer was based off a French graphic novel Le Transperceneige written by 

Jaques Lob. Director Joon-ho found this graphic novel in a bookstore and read the 

book cover to cover while standing in the store. He was inspired by this graphic 

novel and added his own South Korean-Czech science fiction thriller twist to it.

Did Snowpiercer successfully conform and/or expand transnationalism?

At first, while watching this movie I struggled to find connections with this 

being considered a transnational film because it was one society on a single train 

simply segregated by train cars. The more I got to know the characters and researched 

the director and his inspiration it became clear.

In my opinion from the three examples above Snowpiercer conformed directly 

with the definition of transnationalism. The genre of this movie in and of itself 

screams transnationalism: English-language South Korean-Czech science fiction

 thriller film, quite a mouthful and highly transnationalist.