Snowpiercer Will Plow Through Your Blu-ray Player With Awesomeness This October
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It’s comforting that, despite Snowpiercer‘s awkward, bumbling train ride to theaters, the film is making its way to Blu-ray and DVD without a lot of fanfare or controversy. (Unless maybe your local Best Buy is only releasing it on days that begin with “S” or something.) Anchor Bay Entertainment and Radius have put together a solid package worthy of the dark spectacle that is Snowpiercer, with nary a Weinstein in sight.
The Snowpiercer Blu-ray/DVD hits store shelves on October 21 as a two-disc set with an assortment of special features to make the end of the world seem that much more enjoyable. (Though really, there are never enough features for a visually stunning movie like this.) The first disc obviously contains the film in gorgeous high definition, and though director Bong Joon-ho isn’t around for a South Korean commentary track, there is a special Critics’ Commentary with famed genre critic and former FEARNet.com mainstay Scott Weinberg. It’s almost always interesting to hear critics talk about films, as they tend to bring more joy to the proceedings than, say, a more fact-based track from a film historian would.
The second disc is where the glut of the features reside. First, we have “The Birth of Snowpiercer,” which presumably covers the project from the comic to getting Bong involved. There’s an extra called “Chris Evans & Tilda Swinton on Snowpiercer” that will bring together the film’s two most powerful presences to discuss the production, and one called “The Characters,” of which there are plenty in this flick. The cast also includes Ed Harris, John Hurt, Song Kang-ho, Jamie Bell, Octavia Spencer, Ewan Bremner, Alison Pill, and many more.
I’m particularly interested in the intriguing sounding “The Train Brought to Life: Behind the Scenes of a Special Screening,” but not as much as “Transperceneige: From the Blank Page to the Black Screen,” which will hopefully brings the original comic creators Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette in for an interview about the story’s background and origins. And then there’s a concept art gallery and an animated prologue, and though there’s no mention of it, we can bet there’s a theatrical trailer on this beast somewhere.
If you’re an Academy voter, you probably already received a Snowpiercer DVD in the mail recently, as Radius became the early bird in the Oscar For Your Consideration campaign. (Vote Tilda Swinton!) Given how hard it was to find Snowpiercer in theaters, thanks to The Weinstein Company’s flip-flopping over edits and release plans, I’d have even taken a bare-bones DVD to watch this movie before it hit VOD back in June.
Find your place on the train by pre-ordering Snowpiercer on Amazon here.
