I feel like I've been served a massive red pill by this movie...

I feel like I've been served a massive red pill by this movie, but an hour after watching I'm still trying to work out how I feel about all the things that happened in it.

So much of what Curtis does and did makes me think of the refugees -- but I can't make my mind up how the movie judges him... Is he a monster? Is he a hero? Is it better that he escape the tail of the train and reach the engine, or would have been better for his revolution to have failed?

Sup Forums please redpill me on this movie.

Class structures and perfectly natural and life is sustained by consumption and cruelty.

Also good intentions can lead to terrible consequences.

Also his revolution wasn't even his own revolution, and it certainly wasn't real. He was being "groomed" per-say for leadership on the train.

So then class war is natural and in fact a good and healthy thing?

Dividing the train into classes wasn't done out of necessity. It's not like "oh upper class vs. lower class is the only stable social order so let's do that." It's been a while since I saw it, but from what I recall, the people in the back are lucky to even be on the train. Didn't they not have tickets?

Anyway, evaluating him is pretty easy - his actions get every survivor killed, so he fucked up hard. Either way, the movie fucking sucks--too many plot holes.

It's not a good and healthy thing in and of itself, it's just reality.

Yeh but his actions throughout the movie were real, because he wasn't in on anything. Was he the good guy? Did he start bad and redeem himself at the end? Or was he always bad?

It might be done out of necessity -- it turns out the train is failing in various ways due to parts going "extinct", so the underclass in the tail section provide the children to do the necessary manual work in small parts of the rain, which presumably the upper classes of passengers would all refuse to let their own children do.

So the movie doesn't have a moral dimension, it's just saying: this is the only natural way a human polis functions, and any alternative leads to destruction?

Diviidn them WAS out of necessirty. The back of the train served as a breeder of useful people the front section could use (mainly children to run the engines due to broken parts of the engine.)

They didn't have tickets and bum rushed the back and were allowed in.

Curtis' actions get everyone killed not because he fucked up, but because he consciously chose to destroy the train because he felt it wasn't worth living on considering the pain and suffering needed to get it to run.

His actions were real, but he had his strings being pulled by John Hurt and Ed Harris.

Curtis wasn't a good or a bad guy in the reality of this setting. Morally and evil person who ate babies to survive, only to be lifted from the fires and put into the fiery crucible where it was thought he could rise and become what he needed to be, but he refused.

His actions get everyone killed, and you can say that's bad, but the very existence of the train in and of itself could be considered morally reprehensible. You be the judge.

I really don't know what it's trying to say, but that's what I got out of it. Maybe not that any alternative leads to destruction, because the train was an alternative to civilization ending and it was thriving as best as it could.

Life happened and died on it.

Well I see the train as symbolic for human society as a whole. So to argue that it was better to destroy the train than continue that way of life is equivalent to saying it is better for all humanity to end than to continue subsisting in our class-based economic society.

I'm not saying it was better to destroy the train, that's what Curtis thought.

Life can't exist without suffering and unfortunately in the setting of this movie, life doesn't exist without blood. But then the movie slaps you across the face and tells you these people could have left seemingly years before the events we see.

So what happens to the girl and the kid at the end? Who knows? Maybe the polar mauls the shit out of them and they die, or they starve on their own.

The ending proves this movie is blue pilled as fuck. Destruction of class based society resulting in a new world populated by a new mixed race of humans.

I enjoyed the movie until the very end when it showed its true colors

I think the ending is so out of sync with the rest of the movie that it's basically begging you not to take it at face value. It's like the director had to put that ending in to get the movie released, but it only stands up as a 'happy ending' under the most minimal scrutiny: (1) The two kids are in the middle of snowy mountains. All the train's food-producing facilities will be destroyed. There is no way to survive in that environment. (2) They literally bump into a polar bear straight away. A polar bear would read two small human children as prey. The movie even ends on the shot of the polar bear staring at them, as if it's in the very process of thinking "yep, there's my next meal".

I agree. The ending doesnt match the rest of the film.

I am pretty sure the polar bear represents that the earth has warmed to the point of being habitable. On the other hand they could have shown a snowy rabbit/arctic fox/any smaller animal that would be prey for the survivors, not a predator.

Maybe you're right about them being forced to end it the way they did. They could have chosen to use a bear over a rabbit so that if you want to believe they are screwed you can continue to believe that while still giving the impression of a happy ending for those looking for it.

Curtis is the Nietzschean Ubermenchen. He overcomes every obstacle and literally inherits control of all of humanity before deciding that he would enforce his own will and not just copy his predecessor, when he crashes this train with no survivors.

But there are two survivors.

I think it's much easier on reflection to read it as a cynical than a happy ending, though. What are those kids honestly meant to do? The final shots of the movie show them to have crashed in a ravine around huge snowy mountains. There is no obvious source of food or water anywhere in sight. Granted, the polar bear is a sign of general habitation, and must have its own food source, but polar bears can very easily survive in climates impossible for humans on very little nutrition. At any rate, the existence of the polar bear is actually a direct contradiction to the opening exposition of the movie, where it states "all life became extinct". Movies aren't supposed to be that directly and shamelessly inconsistent in their plotting. It seems clearly to me to be a self-consciously cynical ending tacked on to get studio support.

>A nigglet and a junky going through withdrawal would have somehow lived and restarted humanity

>Adam and Eve are now a black boy and an Asian girl.
>They're eaten by a polar bear.
Doesn't matter. Everyone died at the end.

>two people surviving a crashing this train with no survivors is somehow crashing this train with no survivors

I took it as this;

The statement is that, could Curtis' have overcome his egotism and refusal to play the role alotted him in the continued (ugly) saving of mankind, the world was coming back to habitable conditions.

As we see at the end the world is yet still frozen and harsh, and polar bear is going to eat the only two survivors we're shown.

So, the idea that Curtis was the 'ubermenchen' is 'true', but had he the humility to wear the collar of slavemaster for another generation, perhaps two, the timeline would be ready for the end with fruitful conclusion.

He was right.
But he was right at the wrong time.
His ego destroyed humanity, not from vain expression, but from lacking the foresight to know the time was wrong.

Curtis enforced his own morality on humanity in his view this was the better course of action
He valued purity over practicality

That sounds right. Thanks bro.

That interpretation also means that Wilford was a hero of sorts as well, for he managed to preserve humanity during the period of time where the alternative to his exploitative, class-based train society was total annihilation. And to go into a bit more thought over the rightness/wrongness of Curtis' decision at the end, he seems finally to reject the role of slavemaster after discovering the slave children maintaining the engine. But we then only have to consider that the choice he made involved killing every man, woman and child on the train bar 2, and also that at one point in his life he actually killed and ate babies because he preferred the taste of them to adults.