Snowpiercer; Credit sequence analysis

 Snowpiercer (Opening credits)

I want to branch out from space movies and talk about another one of my favorite sci-fi movies. Snowpiercer is about the last of humanity confined to just a train while the rest of the world freezes away after an attempt by the worlds governments to stop global warming. 

What I really like about this opening sequence is how the credits change, in just a black background, by being briefly covered by a wide trucking shot of the silhouette of abandoned and broken buildings, foreshadowing that this movie takes place on a train before we even get to see the train in the first place.

Then when the title "Snowpiercer" is shown, the letters c, p, and o move backwards and fade behind the other letters. I do not know if this is just a stylistic quirk done just to make the title look cool, but I like to it has a deeper meaning than that. Perhaps it represents how the main characters would later begin to move up the train to reach the engine room, or maybe it represents how although the train moves forward, history still repeats itself and progress is moved back: society still remains regressing back despite the train always moving. 

This is a very simplistic opening, but it sets the setting of the film as a future dystopian with only just background news clippings and broad text to notify to further add context to the story. 

I feel like stories like these where there is a lot of lore and background information needs to have some sort of context or prologue to let the viewers know what world they are looking at. Or else the audience would be questioning everything for the rest of the film.