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Cinema Peer Review: ‘Snowpiercer’
Cinema Peer Review
Cinema Peer Review: ‘Snowpiercer’
Bong Joon-ho’s feverish fantasy of post-apocalyptic proletarian revolution onboard a futuristic train is a thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking film, but it definitely puts the ‘fiction’ in science fiction. Snowpiercer starts 17 years before the plot gets in motion, when humans spray a (fictional) cooling agent called CW7 into the upper atmosphere of Earth to try and combat global warming. But the substance works better than anyone expected and causes Earth’s temperatures to dive low enough to make it impossible to live on Earth—unless you’re one of the few refugees that managed to make it to the planet-circling train built by enigmatic inventor Wilford (Ed Harris). Spraying special tiny particles into the atmosphere is actually an approach some people have considered as a way to mitigate the greenhouse effect that traps solar radiation and warms the planet. Researchers actually got the idea from volcanic eruptions, when they noticed that the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Phillippines spewed around 20 million tons of sulfate particles into the air. The sulfate particles reflected enough sunlight to cause Earth’s average temperature to cool by .5 degree Celsius (.9 degree Fahrenheit) over 18 months. Some scientists are interested in the idea of creating an …
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