IF YOU KNOW SNOWPIERCER, IT’S most likely from the 2013 film directed by Bong Joon-ho and starring Chris Evans. But that film’s premise was actually adapted from the 1982 French graphic novel Le Transperceneige – which is also very much the inspiration for the TV adaptation that has just premiered in the US, and is about to hit the UK.
“When I heard about the job, I went back to the graphic novels, and I explored them for some of the big ideas, the philosophy and the leaps of imagination,” executive producer/ showrunner Graeme Manson tells Red Alert. “And I wanted to keep the series [as] an action-adventure, like the movie.”
The premise is that in our ecologically ruined near-future, the remnants of humanity have escaped the global frozen wasteland aboard a self-sufficient super train, Snowpiercer, that endlessly travels on a circular track to nowhere. Inside its 1,001 cars reside the wealthy 1%, the workers who make it all run, and one car full of the poor – who, having fought their way on board, are very much an afterthought.
Where the TV show distinguishes its take on the mythology is by introducing a murder mystery that plucks poor “Tailie” Andre Layton (Daveed Diggs) out of his dire situation and into the cars he’s never seen. Knowing Layton has expertise as a former homicide detective, train concierge Melanie Cavill (Jennifer Connelly) enlists him to help solve some serial murders they’re trying to keep secret.
This story is from the June 2020 edition of SFX.
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This story is from the June 2020 edition of SFX.
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