This is a Great Alexander!

I'd heard that Oliver Stone's cut of Alexander: Director's Cut (2004) was actually a great movie, not the bomb that the theatrical release was. It turns out there were at least three "drector's cuts". Hope we got the right one. 

It starts with Alexander the Great's childhood, with his sexy, witchy mother Angelina Jolie and brutish, cold father Philip II, Val Kilmer. He is tutored by Aristotle, Christopher Plummer. He is very attached to another boy, Hephaistion. Alexander grows up to be Colin Farrell, and Hephaistion Jared Leto.

So Alexander gets no love from his father, even when he excels - like when he tames the wild horse Boucephalas. When Philip takes a Greek bride (Angelina Jolie was considered a savage), Alexander mouthed off and got exiled. Most of the rest of the movie is Alexander conquering the known world. He takes Babylon and conquers (but doesn't manage to kill) Darius of Persia. He heads towards India, taking Bactria and Sogdia, where he meets beautiful Roxane (Rosario Dawson). Although she is a foreign barbarian, he marries her - making Jaren Leto quite jealous. 

Because this isn't just about Alexander's conquests, but about his loves, mainly for Hephaistion. This homosexual relationship at the center of the movie may have been the biggest reason for it's weak box office. To us, it seems to be the most interesting thing about it. It is also the clearest. A lot of movie is about confusing politics and battles with mixed outcomes. So many battles end with Alexander surveying the dead and dying, and even mercy-killing his wounded compatriots. It looks like a disaster, but the voice-over assures us it was a great victory. (Voice-over by Anthony Hopkins as Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals who picked up the Egyptian Alexandria after Alexander died.)

Of course, there's some great exotic locations, sets, and battle scenes, including elephants. Maybe if he'd stuck to that, this would have sold better. 

Zombies on Tap

We saw Zombieland: Double Tap (2019) because the first one wasn't bad, and Netflix was willing to send it to us.

When we left our intrepid crew, they had settled down to live in the White House. Jesse Eisenberg and Emma Stone have become a real couple, and Woody Harrelson is acting like a father to Abigail Breslin, who is growing up. But Breslin wants to meet guys her own age, and Stone isn't ready to commit to Eisenberg. So they take off, and of course, the boys follow.

They first pop into the local mall, where they meet ditsy survivor Zoe Deutch. She has been hiding in the freezer of a fro-yo shop, which is good because she is doesn't seem like she could survive on her own. She immediately wants to do Eisenberg, because, you know, last man on Earth, except Harrelson, the old guy. So she is coming along. Unless she turns into a zombie and has to be put down.

Meanwhile, the women meet pacificist manbun Avan Jogla, who Breslin has the hots for. The two of them sneak off to visit Graceland, leaving Stone to go back to the White House to get transport - and meet Deutch. There won't be a big reconciliation yet.

They don't find the youngsters at Graceland, but they do find Rosario Dawson, holed up in an Elvis-themed hotel. Her and Harrelson have a bit of a fling. (If you are keeping score, everyone has now got a chance to have a little fun but Stone. I think the writers are working through something here.)

There is a sort of pointless but fun interlude here where we meet Luke Wilson and Thomas Middleditch, an odd couple just like Eisenberg and Harrelson. So there's that. 

It all ends up at the fortified pacificist hippy commune that manbun has brought Breslin to. Guns are outlawed and there's weed and sex (but no group sex - unless you want to...). But will they be able to withstand the zombie hordes?

I left out the part where the zombies are evolving, smarter and faster. That's mainly because it hardly comes into play, although it's mentioned many times. It's partly because they tried to raise the stakes without actually raising the stakes, and maybe partly because the zombies are just there to die wetly and sometimes remove a character you don't really like - like Deutch. 

But there are plenty of good gags, the characters are engaging enough (except Stone, who's written as a bit more of a bitch than necessary, and Eisenberg who the writers seem to like more than this viewer does). It was at least as fun as the original, partly because of the metatextual references. Like another Eisenberg/Harrelson teamup, Now You See Me, this sequel wasn't exactly necessary, but why not? 

By the way, this came pout 10 years after the original. Boy does time fly.

Holmes Boys

Young Sherlock Holmes (1985) is an interesting piece of 80's cinema, directed by Barry Levinson and written by Chris Columbus, from Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment. The conceit is simple: What if Holmes and Watson had met in school?

Watson joins Holmes at the school he is attending in London, with cots next to each other. Holmes is already a known eccentric and solver of mysteries: the school high-class bully challenges him to a game of deduction, which he solves cleverly. The school also features an eccentric old inventor, a professor-emeritus who keeps trying to fly an ornithopter. He has a niece, played by Sophie Ward, who Holmes is sweet on. She is the only actor in this I think we've seen before, in The Hunger. 

Meanwhile, there as been a rash of deaths around London - apparent suicides. But we know that a mysterious cloaked figure has been shooting them with drug darts, which cause frightening hallucinations. Holmes thinks these are murders and goes to the police. A certain Lestrade, not yet inspector, doesn't believe him - of course.

This is more of an Indiana Jones with Victorian kids than a mystery of deduction. There's even a Temple of Doom - Pyramid actually. In fact, it's all very 80's kids' adventure. It even has the Spielbergian obsession with explaining how every bit of the mythos came to be: We see the origin of the calabash pipe, the Inverness cape, the deerstalker hat, and even a bit of the violin. Not the coke habit, though. 

I found this to be fun, because I like this type of adventure movie. But it certainly isn't a classic - although it does have some nice hallucinations, including an early CGI stained-glass knight come to life. But if you are a true Baker Street Irregular, you might have trouble with the idea of Holmes with a girlfriend, or of Holmes and Watson meeting before Watson goes to Afghanistan. They actually included disclaimers before and after the film asking forgiveness for this departure from canon.

Night of the Gamers

Game Night (2019) is one of those late 20-teens movies about adults playing games, like Ready or Not. But this isn't the Deadliest Game. It's more The Man Who Knew Too Little. 

It stars Jason Bateman and Rachel McAdams as a competitive couple obsessed with games. They have game nights with their circle of friends, carefully excluding their next door neighbor, Jesse Plemons. He's a creepy cop whose ex-wife was part of game night, but now he's single. 

Bateman has a more successful (better looking, smarter...) brother, Kyle Chandler, who is always getting his goat. He invites everyone over to his fancy modern house for a special game night - one of those real-life murder mysteries, where someone will be kidnapped. When they "kidnappers" show up, they are pretty realistic, and Chandler's "acting" as he struggles to get away is a bit too good. 

You guessed it - he is really being kidnapped. And our friends have to put their game skills together to get him out. Except half the time they don't know what's real and what isn't.

We found this to be a fun modern comedy - I complain a lot about slack writing, pointless improv, and random characterization (looking at you, Will Ferrell). This is pretty tight, with a couple of good twists and a solid ending. Plemons does a bit of that comedy of awkwardness thing where he just holds a fixed expression until it gets uncomfortable, but there's more to his role. 

The friends were also fun: a black couple, Lamorne Morris and Kylie Bunbury, who were a couple since grade school and are very much in love, unless... Also, Billy Magnussen as the dumb one, who also brings bimbos to game night, and Sharon Horgan, the intelligent Irish woman he brings on this occasion because he's tired of losing. Even though he isn't attracted to her, for which she thanks god.

Not the funniest thing we've ever seen, mind you, but it satisfied.

Burnt Norton

We almost didn't queue up Burnt Offerings (1976), because it looked like we'd seen it before: A couple, one of them English, are offered a cheap summer rental on a palatial property that turns out to be pretty creepy - and Bette Davis is in it. But this isn't The Watcher in the Woods. That was Walt Disney, this is Dan Curtis of Dark Shadows fame.

The couple are Karen Black and Oliver Reed, and they have a son, Lee H. Montgomery. They rent a slightly dilapidated mansion for the summer from the elderly siblings Eileen Heckert and Burgess Meredith (played all twinkly and not Penguiny), after being shown in by redneck handyman Dub Taylor (Taylor doesn't have much to do, and disappears after one scene, but I can see why Curtis put him in - he's just fun). The siblings offer the house at a very low price and insist that it is easy to take care of and will look wonderful in the summer. But there's a catch - their 80-year old mother will be staying there. She won't leave her room, but they'll need to bring her meals. (Remember what happened in House of the Devil?)

Reed resists, but Black is in love with the house, so they take it. They bring along Reed's Aunt Elizabeth, a twinkly old painter played by Bette Davis. Black throws herself into making the house a showpiece - housework is not my idea of a vacation, but sure. What nobody notices is that when someone gets hurt, the house gets a little nicer - nobody notices but the audience.

While horsing around in the pool, Reed starts trying to drown their son. That sort of ramps up the tension. There are definitely some unexplored marital issues. But Black is spending more and more time outside of the old lady's door - an old lady she never sees or even hears.

This is not a particularly gruesome movie, but it does get tense and it does have a body count. It also isn't exactly good - Dan Curtis isn't a great director - but has an interesting atmosphere. Davis doesn't get to do much, but has a nice death. Reed has a little fun going coo-coo, and Black is fairly chilling as the oblivious wife who cares only about keeping her house tidy. 

In conclusion, nothing gets burnt. So don't expect it.

China Syndrome

The General Died at Dawn (1936) is a rip-roaring Gary Cooper in China adventure. It was written by Clifford Odets, so you know it's going to be nuts.

It's set in China between the wars, with warlords despoiling the villages. Cooper plays an adventurer and soldier-of-fortune, hired by one faction to get a money belt to Shanghai to buy guns to fight the warlords, particularly Akim Tamiroff. Working against him will be Porter Hall, a weaselly gambler with a beautiful daughter, Madeleine Carroll. He convinces Carroll to cozy up to Cooper on the train to Shanghai, and help relieve him of his belt.

So there is a pretty hot scene on the Shanghai train between the two - although it's a little confusing, because Cooper and Hall both assumed he couldn't go by train, and Cooper and Carroll are strangers or had met before, depending. I'm chalking this up to Odets.

Also, Tamiroff and his men take over the train, take the money and give it to Hall to take to Shanghai. So Carroll was not needed for this caper. Also, Tamiroff decides to take Cooper to Shanghai by boat - so Hall isn't needed either. Tamiroff likes Cooper - they are old frenemies and get to do that smooth villain/hot-headed good guy banter thing. 

I'll leave off here, except to mention that the arms dealer they are all trying to rendezvous with is William Frawley (Fred Mertz). He spends most of his screen time fulminating or drunk. 

This is all directed by Lewis Milestone, with a little more panache than you might expect. There are a few neat match cuts, and the harbor full of junks is quite romantic. Also, there were a lot more Asians playing Chinese than you would expect, although Akim Tamiroff as a warlord and Dudley Diggs as Cooper's Chinese sponsor get the slant-eye makeup treatment - the first use of foam rubber makeup appliances (eyelid folds), according to the internet.

Milestone had a long career, starting with All Quiet on the Western Front, continuing through Ocean's 11 and Mutiny on the Bounty. I will definitely check out some more of these.

Can't Cut, Won't Cut

One Cut of the Dead (2019) has a couple of tricks up its sleeve. In fact, it's almost 2 movies in one. And I am going to spoil many of them. If you haven't seen this, don't read this yet - go see it and come back. For now, all you need to know is that this is a Japanese movie, made for the Shudder horror streaming channel.

It starts out in an old abandoned industrial building - a zombie is menacing a pretty girl. Then the director yells cut and we see that this is just a movie. The director is pretty intense, but the makeup lady seems nice. She kind of awkwardly tells the two actors about the urban myth of this building - that horrible experiments were done there during the war. They hear a noise outside - oh my god! Real zombies!

That was the story I heard - real zombies show up on the location of a cheap zombie movie. The other thing I had heard is that the first scene is one continuous take - no cuts. You don't notice it at first, then you can't miss it. And some things start making you notice that there is a director and camera man in the movie, but they aren't making this film. There is another camera and crew filming the fake director and camera man making the fake zombie film inside the real zombie film. Confused? Here's an example.

At one point someone is running away from a zombie, and the point of view (the camera) is suddenly on the ground. It stays there for a while - someone dropped the camera. Finally someone picks it up and follows the action. And when some "blood" splatters on the lens, you actually see someone's fingers wipe it off.

Then, at about 37 minutes, the movie ends with a crane shot of the final girl. Followed by: "Six months earlier". We meet the director, making a commercial. A producer wants him for a job. The director says, he's fast, cheap, and yet the quality is average. He's just right for this job: A movie made for the new zombie channel - made with one camera, no cuts, and broadcast live.

This section of the movie uses normal editing, with cuts and excerpts from TV, etc. It shows our director taking on this impossible task, partly to impress his blase teenage daughter. It shows the cast, the walkthroughs, then the big day.

This is the payoff. Now we get to go behind the scenes of that long single take from the first 37 minutes. You see why some scenes were awkward. You get to see the camera filming the real movie about the fake movie. You see who dropped the camera and who picked it up. All the way to the final crane shot.

So you have three acts: A movie, shot in one take. The circumstances that lead up to the movie being made. A behind-the-scenes look at the making of the movie in Act 1. It reminded me of Noises Off. That's about a play, and you see the rehearsal, then backstage for the first performance, then finally, the last performance. There's the same quality here of seeing something interesting and odd, then discovering why and how.

I should note that although the first act is a zombie movie (with a zombie movie inside!), the actual body count of this movie is zero - the zombies are all fake. It's a movie about movies, especially the type made fast and cheap, where the quality is at least average.

Can You Do the Fandango?

Scaramouche (1952) rounds out the set of swashbucklers we've been watching, starting with Fanfan le Tulipe and continuing with Cartouche. They are all set in pre-Revolutionary France, and feature roguish heroes with at least two women. 

In this case, the hero is Stewart Granger, who strikes me as a sort of Jimmy Stewart mixed with Cary Grant (footnote: I just checked wikipedia - he was actual christened James Stewart!). But first we meet the villain, Mel Ferrer, a French nobleman. We see him killing or wounding several men in consecutive duels as a troop of horsemen ride up to summon him to the Queen. So right off the bat, we have swordfights and galloping horsemen. The Queen, Marie Antoinette played by Nina Foche, wants to marry him off to one of her attendants, Janet Leigh. He is obedient, if not ardent.

We find Granger in a camp of travelling actors, looking for his girlfriend, Eleanor Parker. They tell him she is getting married, so he heads off to break it up and marry her himself. But before he can make good on the second part, he finds out that his friend Richard Anderson is in trouble. He has been distributing revolutionary pamphlets. So he goes to aid him, but they are caught by, of course, Mel Ferrer, the greatest swordsman in France. So Anderson is killed and when Granger tries to avenge him, he is disarmed and humiliated.

Somewhere in here, we learn that Granger has been receiving money all his life on the condition that he never seek out his real father - but when the money stops, he beats the name out of his lawyer. Then he meets and falls in love with Janet Leigh - and finds out that she is his half-sister, which dampens his spirits. The idea that she is supposed to marry his deadly enemy doesn't do wonders for him either.

He goes into hiding with his girlfriend's theatrical troupe, who specialize in commedia del'arte, a very stylized form of Italian slapstick. You know, Harlequin, Columbine, Pierrot, Toby the dog, those clowns. He played Scaramouche, and kept his mask on as much as possible. 

So, to cut to the chase, he learns to swordfight and finally encounters Ferrer at a performance. This leads to the famous fight scene, with swinging on curtain ropes, fights through the hteater boxes, out to the halls, through the theater and onto the stage. In a movie full of fights and chases, this is a great topper. I won't tell you who comes out victorious though. I won't say which girl he gets either. See for yourself. 

They're Creepy and They're Kooky - The Manson Family!

Around New Year's, I said I wouldn't be doing a 2019 round-up review, because we still haven't seen a ;ot of them - Netflix is holding out on us. But they did let us watch Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), which was nice.

It is set in 1969. Leonardo DiCaprio is the star of a (made-up) TV western series, now cancelled. His career is a little precarious, taking roles in other shows, mostly as the heavy. His stunt man, buddy and go-fer, Brad Pitt, is even more precarious. He has trouble getting work because he maybe killed his wife. Tarantino shows him on a boat, getting yelled at by his wife, with a speargun in his hand...

Most of the movie is DiCaprio freaking out about his career, and Pitt cruising around, being cool. DiCaprio lives next door to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, which is cool. Pitt keeps running into these cute hippy chicks, and eventually follows one out to the Spahn Ranch, where he once worked on westerns. Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) walks around town or bops around her house. It's sort of aimless, but also creepy, because we know what's coming.

But, and I don't think it's a spoiler anymore, it doesn't happen. The Manson kids decide to kill DiCaprio instead of Polanski, which was a bad idea. They get killed most conclusively. Which is a very good feeling, although just a fantasy.

The real joys of this are soaking up old 1960s LA - Musso and Frank Grill, the Strip,  the cars, the canyon. Tarantino dressed real LA locations to match 1969, with no CGI. We get a lot of real people showing up, not just the Mansons and Sharon Tate. Damian Lewis does a great Steve McQueen. We get Mama Cass and Michelle Philips. Real-life director Sam Wanamaker directs an episode of Lancer, a real TV show with (not real) DiCaprio. And we meet Bruce Lee.

This is kind of problematic, since he is made out to be a big jerk who couldn't really fight. That is not period accurate. But it sort of feeds into the fantasy: These All-American actors with their rough-and-ready stunt men are what's great about the country. Not those foreigners and the damned dirty hippies. As a member of the hippie community, I should take offense. But, hell, it's all in fun.

Not sure what to think about Sharon Tate watching and apparantly enjoying her last movie, the Dean Martin as super-spy Matt Helm trainwreck, The Wrecking Crew. I never managed to get through more than one of those stinkers. 

Rex Ingram Mini-fest

I would like to say that I came up with this double bill myself, but Ms. Spenser picked The Thief of Bagdad (1940), and Netflix suggested The Green Pastures (1936).

Thief is a technical fantasy, directed by, among others, Michael Powell, produced by Alexander Korda, with his brother Zoltan directing some bits. Add a score by Miklos Rozsa, and you've got some heavy-duty romantic film-making. 

It starts in old Baghdad, where we meet a blind beggar, John Justin, and his dog. He is taken to a harem where he tells his tale. Once he was the Sultan, but his vizier, Jaffar (Conrad Veidt) convinced him to go among his subjects in disguise - then had him imprisoned. In the dungeon he meets a little thief, named Abu - played by Sabu. 

They escape and have adventures, including Justin falling in love with princess June Duprez. But Veidt wants the princess for himself, and manages to catch Justin and Sabu. A mighty sorcerer, he strikes Justin blind and turns Sabu into a dog. But the princess falls into a deep sleep that can only be broken by Justin. And Justin and Sabu can only be returned to their former selves if the princess embraces Veidt - which she does. 

Things would be pretty dire, but Sabu finds a jinn - Rex Ingram. And after many more adventures, all is set right. 

This movie is great fun, with colorful sets full of colorful extras. You see the Powell touch with technicolor, mattes and sets, plus some early greenscreen work, like when the giant Rex Ingram is trying to step on Sabu. A great spectacle.

The Green Pastures, is a smaller scale production, although the scope is pretty big. It has an all-black cast, and stars Ingram in several roles. He starts as a Preacher, who is teaching Sunday school. When one of the kids asks what God looks like, he says he imagines that he looks like a wise old preacher he knew as a child. Then we are taken to the Green Pastures, in Heaven, where the angels are having a picnic and fish fry. When De Lawd shows up, it is Ingram again.

And so we go through the stories from the Bible: a little Adam (Ingram again) and Eve, a little Noah (Eddie Anderson!) and the Ark, some Moses and Aaron, and finally, just a hint at the New Testament to come. These stories are updated to rural 30's southern US - with the evil people of the earth represented by pistol-packing gangsters and ukulele-playing party girls. (I'm a uke player myself, so I love this scene the most of all.) They are also trimmed down a lot - so we get Moses and the trick staff, but only one of the plagues, no Red Sea stroll, and Moses' death outside the Promised Land. That last probably resonated with black audiences then.

All of this is backed up by the sweetest gospel choir. So you might find this movie racist at worst, condescending at best, but I'd be surprised if you don't find it entertaining. The acting is fine, the characters sweet and the uplift is real. 

But I'd say Ingram's jinn is more fun.

Gently Up the Stream

Upstream Color (2013) is an odd mix of horror and art film - or maybe surrealist horror. I guess the reviews weren’t great when it came out, because for some reason I avoided it. I think I got it confused with another amnesia movie, Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind. I avoided that because Jim Carey.

This starts with a variety of kids taking a drug, which seemed to put their minds in sync. Then we see a man making the drug out of a flower, some fungus and the grubs in the dirt of the flower. He uses it to drug a woman, Amy Seidetz, give her hypnotic suggestions, make her do strange tasks, and empty her bank account. This is very creepy. He finally leaves and sets her free. She wakes up to find worms crawling under her skin, which she tries to cut out.

This made me think the movie is a metaphor for amphetamine or cocaine - a famous side effect is the sensation of bugs under the skin. They made a movie about that too, Bug, but I don’t ever want to see it.

The next scene has her wander up to a kind of ambulance with weird sounds coming out of loudspeakers. Mad scientist Andrew Sensenig, looking somewhat Stellan Skarsgaard, helps her by removing the worm and transferring it to the body of a piglet.

Later, we see her meet writer/director/co-star Shane Carruth. He is attracted to her, although she fends him off. She tells him she in therapy for memory loss and shows him her meds. He is taken aback, but they have seem to have some kind of bond. They begin to date and move in together. At some point, she notices that he has the same worm-under-the-skin scars that she has. Slowly they piece together, partly by telepathy, what has happened to them.

This is interspersed with scenes of Sensenig visiting his pigs. When he sits with them, he perceives the lives of other people, including Seidetz and Carruth. It seems that he has a psychic connection to them as well. His other hobby is to record natural or ambient sounds in the field, and manipulate them into the sounds we heard from his loudspeakers - to attract the affected?

I won't tell you that it's all clear in the end, but it isn't all that mysterious. 

Part of the mystery is how this is filmed and edited. The movie is full of disjointed shots and scenes, each one interesting, sometimes beautiful. But it's not always clear what information you are supposed to take away, or how much time has passed since the last shot, or who these people are.

It is a beautiful experience, even though there is a lot of ugliness in it. It is also moving, although maybe a bit pretentious. It also isn't quite a horror film, but it is pretty scary. 

House in Reno

5 Against the House (1955) is an odd little noir - it starts out as a sort of college comedy, then becomes a heist film, but not a funny one.

It starts with four older college kids in Reno. Guy Madison, the responsible one is reminding everyone that they need to by back in the car by midnight. Alvy Moore, the goofy one, scoffs, and Kerwin Matthews, the rich kid, just wants to try his roulette system. Brian Keith, the dark brooding one, tells them all to listen to Madison. They spend a little time in Harold's Casino and almost get swept up when someone tries to rob the place. They are standing behind him at the cashier's counter and the police think maybe they are part of the gang. They clear everything up, and someone from the casino mentions that no one can rob Harold's - too much security. That sets the plot in motion.

They arrive at college and immediately shanghai a freshman to be their gofer, as was the custom in those days. It seems that these guys are Korean War vets, which explains their age. Keith also saved Madison's life, and got injured badly, which explains his PTSD. Madison has a townie girlfriend, Kim Novak, who sings in a nightclub. There is romance and college hi-jinks. Then Matthews has his bright idea.

He comes from a rich family, but has never done anything himself. He has a plan to rob Harold's, then give back the money - no harm no foul. He talks Moore and Keith into it, but they don't want to ask Madison. But he has already decided to go to Reno to marry Novak, so they take him along and figure they'll talk him into when they get there. 

This doesn't work out too well. Mainly because Keith finally snaps and decides that he is going to keep the money, and everyone better do as he says or Novak gets it. Of course, the last act is the heist, which I'll skip, except to mention that William Conrad is the casino employee they hijack.

Most of this is just fair. Novak is OK - I didn't think she was better than the picture. Keith wasn't better than the picture, but definitely brought something extra to it. He was fun as a nihilistic college philosopher, and scary as an unstable guy with a gun. Madison, who seemed to play a lot of cowboys, is good looking, but that's about it. The other two were mostly comic relief - and not bad if you like that kind of stuff. 

There's some good location shooting in Reno at the end, if you want to see the biggest little city in the world in the 1950s.

Rolling Stock

I resisted watching Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer (2013) for quite a while, because I assumed that the harsh secret was cannibalism. I'm happy to tell you that I was wrong. Also happy I watched this, mostly for the atmosphere.

It takes place 17 years after an attempt to solve global warming leads to global freezing. The only life left on Earth is a group of people on a luxury train that travels endlessly around the globe. Why this prevents them from freezing is never explained. The train has a special inexhaustible  fuel, but I don't think it requires motion. Anyway, just roll with it. 

In the tail of the train are refugees and their kids. They live crowded together, and fed on bricks of grey protein jelly - not soylent green, but not much better. Their spiritual leader, John Hurt, is working towards their eventual overthrow of the oppressive regime, symbolized by Helen Mirren as the Thatcher-like minister who comes to the tail section to steal children - in this case, Octavia Spenser's. 

Chris Evans plays another sort of leader - a good, capable man who is reluctant to lead. His side-kick is Jamie Bell. He discovers that the guards guns don't have any ammunition - it all ran out and there's no way to get more. So the revolution is on.

First, they get a famous thief out of cold storage, Song Kang-ho. He also breaks out a young woman, Go Ah-sung. They are both addicted to a volatile substance derived from industrial waste, but have skills they need.

So the team heads up to the front of the train. They make many discoveries, have lots of fights, and so on. When Evans gets to the head of the train, he meets the train's inventor, Ed Harris - and makes more discoveries.

I have to acknowledge that the plot is full of holes - in fact the whole premise is. So never mind that. The story is great. The influence of Terry Gilliam (Hurt's character's name is Gilliam) and Edgar Wright (Jamie Bell is Edgar) are clear. The train has a great post-steampunk feel, not as over the top as Brazil, but you won't be surprised by the Art Deco cockpit in the front of the train. Bong gets some fine performances by some great actors for this. 

So that, along with Parasite, completes our little Bong Joon-ho film festival. We loved this but don't expect to watch the TV series that is just starting up.