10 Smart Movies Which Are Secretly Dumb

All the love in the world to Bong Joon-ho - a supremely talented filmmaker whose post-apocalyptic sci-fi thriller Snowpiercer is a pretty damn fun time if you don't dig into it too much.

Years before the current glut of thriller movies focused on class, Snowpiercer probed class warfare in a way which critics rushed to call "deep" and "insightful," no matter that it couldn't really be more obvious and straight-forward about its message.

Snowpiercer takes place on a train housing the remnants of the human race, who are divided into sections of the train according to their class. There's not much to get here, right?

To call the film an allegory for class mobility, as many have, feels incredibly generous considering how hilariously transparent the thematics are. The "subtext" is just... the text.

And that's not really a problem - Bong Joon-ho clearly wanted to make a populist film that split the difference between an intriguing concept and a broad, showy, action-packed execution.

But compare it to Joon-ho's more recent, Oscar-winning Parasite - a genuinely smart movie that's secretly even smarter than it looks - and Snowpiercer basically resembles its dumb jock of an older brother.