Snowpiercer — Episode 8 Review

There Are His Revolutions

By Mark

At the end of episode seven we see Andre (Diggs) approaching the strange LJ (Basso) and beginning to tell her his secret, that’s not so secret.

Well, he has arranged for LJ to see for himself and she meets up with Miles (Fletcher) to get into the engine to see for herself that there is no Mr. Wilford.

She, naturally, reports back to mummy and daddy who team up with Commander Grey (Murphy) and they all ambush Ruth (Wright) with the truth.

They confront Melanie (Connelly) in first class and, despite her best attempts to appease them, they turn on her and the Commander takes control of things, putting Melanie in her room, where she manages to press an alert to lock the engine down.

The Commander calls for all his jack boots to move to first class. This frees up Andre and his cronies to begin their own assault on the train.

Up in the engine, Bennett (Goldberg), orders the lockdown. Miles asks why, Javier (Urbina) runs to the monitors and sees the Commander and others trying to get in.

Javier tells Bennett they should let them in, tell them the truth about Wilford and Melanie, naturally, Bennett disagrees. Javier takes matters into his own hands and opens the door.

Luckily, Bennett manages to stop them getting any further, punching Javier out the door. Javier confirms the truth, there is no Wilford, this upsets Ruth hugely.

She confronts Melanie, who tells her she left Wilford to die at the side of the tracks. He didn’t build the train, she did, all he wanted was to sell tickets and live his final hours in the night car surrounded by whores. Ruth tells her she will be executed.

Andre and Bess (Sumner) make it to the tail to free up the resistance and Andre gives us his best ‘they’ll never take our freedom’ speech. Which is interesting.

As the tailies and third are up top, the jack boots are going under the main part of the train. But there’s a trap as some men fire large metal spikes at the jack boots, killing them.

The Commander and some men attempt to go up top and take them from the rear, but this results in an almighty carnage fight in the club, where Andre is wearing blue war paint, like I said, Freedom.

When the jack boots call retreat, rather than getting on with it, maybe, I don’t know, going after them to stop them re-grouping, they instead stand around, mourning the dead, lining up the bodies, talking, and are surprised when a load more jack boots (where are all these coming from?) turn up with teargas.

Back in first class, where the Commander has managed to get to very quickly, they’ve also managed to get Pike, Steven Ogg (“Westworld (TV)”, “The Walking Dead (TV)”), (who I admit I’d completely forgot about, he was Andre’s nemesis in the tail) out of the draws before anyone knew, and they try to use him to get to Andre.

This is surprising for a number of reasons, such as everyone else takes forever to come round after being in the draws, except Pike. Also both Klempt (Anderson) and Aaron Glenane (“68 Whiskey (TV)”, “ Danger Close: The Battle Of Long Tan “) are in the draws and yet seemed to have missed that he was taken.

Everardo Gout (“Mars (TV)”, “Luke Cage (TV)”) is the director with Hiram Martinez (“Get Shorty (TV)”, “The Last Ship (TV)”) and Tina de la Torre on writing duties.

It’s a fast-paced episode but the fighting scenes could be a lot better. The nightclub scene for instance, has been filmed with a strobe light going, which means you miss quite a bit of the action, and then the slow-mo bits, where the light stays on, looks cheap and very studio.

The whole thing is building up but, to me at least, it feels obvious what this is all leading to. We’ll see as things progress.

Originally published at https://www.ocmoviereviews.com on May 10, 2020.