'Snowpiercer': Another cult hit for Bong

THE TITLE vehicle in "Snowpiercer" is a nuclear-powered train that chugs around the major continents of the world in a giant loop.

So, to say that the folks aboard are going in circles is accurate. Doubly so: The rich folks are packed into the front, the poor are stuck back in steerage, where they eat soylent greenish protein bars and plot revolution. They want to push aside the elites, take control of the engine that makes everything run.

Director Bong Joon-ho ("The Host") isn't showing a revolution, he's showing us every revolution. And all of them, he implies, have only led us to where we are today - having yet another argument about the haves and the have-nots.

While these arguments can be dull, Bong's nutty movie is anything but - a crazy patchwork of genres (a dash of "Mad Max," a dollop of Kubrick) that compliments the movie's segmented structure. The poor fight their way to the front through compartments, each representing a new challenge and/or an idea - a biosphere, a prison, a party, a drug den and a fascist elementary school where children learn to keep their place and worship the train's dear leader/conductor/inventor.

All of it is visually spectacular (shot on film, of all things). No time to gawk at the images, though - "Snowpiercer" is too kinetic: here a rolling battering ram, there a massive hatchet fight featuring storm troopers in night-vision goggles.

Bong's a genre-bending master of controlled chaos, and he used that rep to attract a boffo cast. That isn't any schmo leading the revolution - it's Chris "Captain America" Evans, tutored for the job by the Yoda-ish John Hurt, rallying the peasants, who include Octavia Spencer and Jamie Bell.

They battle their way through a gauntlet of storm troopers and still more prestigious actors - none more entertaining than Tilda Swinton in fake teeth and Margaret Thatcher hair, delivering Orwellian lectures about order and decorum and everyone knowing his place.

Some year for Swinton, who's already worked for Jim Jarmusch and Wes Anderson. Maybe it's my weakness for mass hatchet brawls, but this is by far the best thing she's done in 2014.

"Snowpiercer" is literally all over the place, and is better for it - a Korean director working from a French graphic novel and multinational cast, all appropriate to the movie's themes and ideas.

The train rips through an icebound world that's resulted from a botched experiment to reduce global warming. The folks aboard are all that's left of humanity - the train is a rolling, secular ark (this would make a great, freaky double bill with Darren Aronofsky's "Noah").

They're the last of humanity, with all of the problems that condemned mankind in the first place. They are, as a group, silly, selfish, destructive, deluded and probably doomed (the "reveal" is a little too transparent).

But the movie itself is never cynical or downbeat, and it's improbably fun. The ending suggests that it's time for a do-over, and, boy, does that sound appealing.

Stop the train, says Bong, we want to get off.