Snow Piercer, a high-profile sci-fi indie project, is picking up serious momentum now that Oscar Frontrunner Octavia Spencer has joined the film’s cast.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Spencer will star alongside Chris Evans, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton and Korean actor Kang Ho Song (The Host).
Directed and co-scripted by Bong Joon-Ho, Snow Piercer is based on Kelly Masterson’s adaption of a 1970s French graphic novel known as Le Transperceneige which was written by Jacques Lob.
The movie is set in a future where a failed experiment to halt global warming kills off most of the planet’s inhabitants during a protracted Ice Age – except for those traveling in the Snow Piercer.
The Snow Piercer can best be described as a train of sorts powered by a perpetual-motion engine that travels around the globe.
Of course, all is not well on the speeding Snow Piercer, as a de-facto class system has evolved on the troubled train, with a revolution waiting in the wings.
Indeed, the poorest passengers – forced to live in appalling conditions – suffer from perpetual cold and hunger, while the inhabitants of the train’s “premium class” live like the upper nobility of old. Spencer will apparently play a passenger on the train who joins the revolt in order to save her son.
“Le Transperceneige is going to be much more spectacular with all the trains and frozen scenery,” Bong Joon-Ho said way back in 2008.
“But the spectacle is not what I really want to show… [Rather], the mood and sentiment you can feel inside the train, the desperateness. The exterior should be only groundwork to show all that.”
