Snowpiercer and Titanic

(Spoilers for both movies)

Snowpiercer is a 2013 action drama by recent best director winner Bong Joon-ho. It tackles class

differences unsubtly through the journey of Curtis (Chris Evans) and his rag-tag group of “tail

sectioners” as they make their way from the back of the Snowpiercer, the train on which they are

stuck due to a deadly cold outside, all the way to the front, to the sacred engine that keeps everyone

left on Earth alive. 

Titanic is a 1997 epic by not-as-recent best director winner James Cameron. It tackles class

differences unsubtly through the romance of Jack (fabulously young Leo DiCaprio) and Rose (Kate

Winslet) as they dodge the restraints meant to keep them apart, either social or physical as the ship

goes down. 

These two movies, though they may seem as different as two films can get, are two sides of the

same coin. 

The first thing in Snowpiercer that made me think of Titanic was Jamie Bell’s Edgar pronouncing shit

as “shite”, something that immediately reminded me of Titanic’s Tommy Ryan. There’s something

incredibly charming about that, which I can’t discern if it is just to do with Irish accents sounding

adorable foreign, but from that moment on I was drawing connections with Titanic. 

Both movies are claustrophobic. They are contained to a single vehicle that dooms the characters.

The entire world is contained within their walls, as the kid in Snowpiercer points out, “the whole wide

train.” This allows for the sparsity of the world to be portrayed on a far more compact scale, allowing

class differences to shine through easily based on only a notation on a ticket. In Snowpiercer, they

are barred by the elements from escaping into the outside world, forcing the tail sectioners in only

one direction: forward. In Titanic, the claustrophobia serves first as a blessing, as it pushes the two

characters together. Both movies are brought to the curse of claustrophobia: the revelation that there

is nowhere else to go.

Both movies also have the a subplot of The Machine vs God. There is a clear machinery aesthetic

which draws attention to manual labor and the difficulty of keeping a giant machine working. In

Titanic, the characters constantly tease fate by declaring the ship “unsinkable,” Cal even declaring,

“God himself could not sink this ship!” The men in the boiler rooms are also the first to be sacrificed

when the iceberg hits, showing just how valued these people are. Snowpiercer repeatedly calls the

engine the soul of the train, the organ that keeps everyone alive. If it wasn’t already clear how

important the engine was, there’s a colorful scene in the middle in which a group of schoolchildren

sing, “what happens if the engine stops? We all freeze and die!” 

Not to mention the fact that Edgar is a version of Jack Dawson that exists independent of romance.

He’s still a tragic and doomed character that maintains both innocence and nihilism. He has the

reckless rebel energy that Jack Dawsn displays, but they come out in different ways. From the

moment that Titanic hits the iceberg, people are being picked off. Not everyone is going to survive

the tragedy, and the number of people in the movie rapidly depletes as they get off the boat, for

better or for worse. By the end, there is only Rose left, stranded atop a door floating in the Atlantic.

In Snowpiecer, the revolution begins as an entire team of downtrodden misfits but ends with only

Chris Evans facing the ultimate villain. 

So, sure, while there are definitely more differences than similarities between the two movies, there

is a lot that ties them together. They are the light and dark versions of the same story, like stepping

into an alternate reality where everything at first seems unfamiliar, but then you realize that the

furniture is in the same place.