Snowpiercer's original ending had a completely different message

Le Transperceneige's desperate ending shows how Snowpiercer's inspiration has centered more on the climate crisis than on class issues.

While many fans know Snowpiercer from the critically acclaimed 2013 film or the subsequent TV adaptation, the story originally came from the 1982 French graphic novel Le Transperceneige. However, instead of the vicious class-based satire of the screen version, this comic is about the dangers of climate change, leading to a very different ending.

Le Transperceneige was written by French comic book writer Jacques Lob and artist Jean-Marc Rochette, and the popular 2013 film Snowpiercer, directed by Bong Joon-ho and starring Chris Pine as Curtis, is a remake of Snowpiercer. A very loose adaptation of the main character 1 - The Runaway, Proloff. To be clear, issues of climate crisis and classism abound in both versions of Snowpiercer, but Le Transperceneige's incredibly depressing ending shows how the original story explored climate at its worst Crashing horror, designed to engage an audience far from familiar with the existential nature of this menace.

Snowpiercer's Original Ending Kills EVERYONE

Both the movie and the comic take place on a gigantic locomotive, a very powerful and resilient behemoth that is constantly traveling around the globe to keep its inhabitants alive in a post-apocalyptic world created by a terrible disaster climate crisis. Of course, the climate crisis is an incredibly real threat in the real world, and climate scientists predict immeasurable damage to the planet and humanity in the coming years, making 1982's Le Transperceneige all the more poignant. Like the Snowpiercer movie, Le Transperceneige follows a desperate man in the back of a train (for comparison, the graphic novel Snowpiercer has 1,001 cars, while the movie has about 100), with the ground floor Citizens live in filth and disease. However, in contrast to the movie's wildly revolutionary protagonist, Curtis, the graphic novel's Prolov is only concerned with his own survival.

Le Transperceneige also admits that the post-apocalyptic frozen landscape was caused by climate weapons of war, unlike the film Snowpiercer, which determined that the frozen environment was caused by a faulty experiment that attempted to After cooling the earth global warming. This drastically changes the medium's messaging, as Le Transperceneige explicitly has humanity end the world at its worst impulses. Also, while the movie ends with a hint of potential hope for the future— The children in the film escape to a world that can now support life—the comics offer only a bleak worst-case scenario, with Prolov dead and hopeless.

The Original Snowpiercer Is a Warning

The graphic novel Le Transperceneige ends with Proloff accidentally killing his budding love Adeline by breaking a car window and exposing her to the cold. He was then rescued by a man named Forrest, who told him that he had been spreading a terrible disease from the back carriages, slowly killing off all the inhabitants of the entire train. Le Transperceneige ends with Proloff alone on a never-ending train, slowly dying, witnessing the breakdown of humanity, in part due to his own selfishness. Later volumes of Le Transperceneige introduced other trains, but the original graphic novel emphasized the truly brutal nature of the climate crisis, and its potential impact on the planet, in a more stark, bleak form than the Snowpiercer film.

Finally, while "Snowpiercer" can be read as a satirical satire of the social status quo, "Beyond" is more like a warning of the future, so the story has a very different relationship to the concept of hope future. Proloff's daring escape from the back of a train in Le Transperceneige mirrors Curtis' escape attempt in Snowpiercer in many ways, but the origins of Apocalypse, Proloff's motivations, and the graphic novel's frustratingly dire ending suggest it was originally about potential See the horrors of the climate crisis through the lens of the early 1980s — not the idea of ​​fighting for opportunity for the next generation through the lens of 2013.