Listen to our Snowpiercer episode on:
It’s hard to believe we’ve been doing this podcast for over a year now, and yet this is our first encounter with Tilda Swinton. Suffice to say, based on her performance as a bizarre combination of Michael Caine, Margaret Thatcher and Coronation Street’s Deirdre Barlow in Snowpiercer, we’ll definitely be returning to the well again.
Swinton isn’t the lead in Bong Joon-ho’s quirky post-apocalyptic sci-fi, but she certainly makes an impression with her limited screen time as Minister Mason, the spokesperson for Snowpiercer‘s despotic overlord, the seldom-seen Wilfred, who engineered the titular high-speed train that now houses the last remnants of humanity. The movie’s fairly straightforward premise finds a rag-tag group of lower-class survivors including Chris Evans, Jamie Bell and Octavia Spencer leading a rebellion against the elites who populate the front of the train.
The film plays out surprisingly like a video game, with each carriage of the train introducing an apparently self-contained world for our heroes to battle their way through. Characterisation is fairly minimal, but the movie is briskly paced and boasts some memorable visuals and action sequences – most of which work best if you don’t think about the logistics involved in them for too long…
In this week’s episode of Beyond The Box Set, we discuss bonkers musical numbers, unceremonious death scenes and the fact that it’s kind of weird to be so freaked out by the prospect of eating cockroaches when you’ve already admitted to munching down on a baby. Following some very productive drinking game brainstorming, we then move onto our fantasy sequel pitches, which this week feature a blockbuster crossover, a change of platforms and John’s creativity being thwarted by social media.
Our Snowpiercer episode is available on all good podcasting platforms, including iTunes, Spotify and Stitcher – just follow the links at the top of this blog. As ever, if you’re a fan of the show we’d really appreciate a subscription and/or a review on your Podcasting platform of choice, as both are great ways to improve our visibility and help us to find new listeners.
Beyond The Box Set is also now on Patreon, where you can subscribe for as much or as little as you like to gain access to a wealth of fabulous bonus content – including our weekly bonus show Beyond BTBS, a 30-second ad slot on the show and the opportunity to become a character in one of our sequels!
Next week, another lovely guest swings by to discuss a divisive indie hit that literally inspired the phrase ‘Manic Pixie Dream Girl’. It’s bound to be a good one, so do tune in…