Celebrate the end of summer with 'Snowpiercer'

Summer, the season of sweat, is over. It's time to bring in the cold months, and there's no better way to celebrate the cold than with Snowpiercer.

Snowpiercer is a weird movie. Its premise — that the planet has entered a brutal ice age and humanity persists aboard a single train with wildly disparate classes of people separated by individual train cars — is bizarre. But trust me, it's great.

Snowpiercer came out without much fanfare in 2013 but has since become a bit of a cult favorite, and with a new Snowpiercer TV series coming in 2020, now is a great time to check out this apocalyptic movie.

Chris Evans stars in this dystopian depiction of class struggle as Curtis Everett, a denizen of the last car on the train where there are no windows, no real food, and train guards regularly abuse passengers. It's the slums of the train, and the people of the slums aren't taking it anymore.

They don't know much about the rest of the train, only that the highest class of people live in luxury at the front. And they want to get to the front.

Obviously, the people at the front will do anything they can to maintain the status quo. They love their comfort and their power. Violence ensues.

It's a classic story of class struggle and revolution, one that has happened on Earth countless times and one that has been used as the backbone of fiction countless times. But it's rare to see such an inventive and specific depiction of it like you see in Snowpiercer, which is based on the French graphic novel Le Transperceneige.

The train is absurd. It was built before the man-made ice age, and began as a luxury train that could circle the world in perpetuity. It takes in snow and ice and processes it into clean water. It houses fish and animals for food, all kept in a perfect self-sustaining balance. Wilford, the man who created the train, is seen as a god-like figure.

It is so over-the-top, it sounds like it could be a comedy. But it's not funny. Yes, it's ridiculous but it's gripping, heartfelt, and far too intense to really laugh at. People are struggling for their quality of life, dying as they fight their way up to the front fo the train, stopping along the way to eat sushi and wade through a car full of dancing clubbers. The juxtaposition is wild.

As the movie progresses, more and more is revealed about the train and what happened to the earth, how things got where they are now on the train. The train has been circling the earth for 18 years.

There's no escaping the train because the people who have escaped froze to death within minutes. The outside world is an ever-present reminder of death, drilled into everyones' psyches. There's no escape, so it seems, so the only option is to make life better within the train.

Snowpiercer is so entertaining and so weird. It's a great way to send off the dreamy days of summer as we move onto the colder half of the year.

Watch Snowpiercer on Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime Video.