Let me start this off by saying that Snakes on a Plane is a great movie. A full year since I first wrote about it, a full year of anticipation has done nothing to harm this movie, it’s still everything we expected. In fact, it’s more than we expected, since we were expecting a cheesy, so-bad-it’s-good movie and Snakes on a Plane is anything but - it’s an enjoyable, light-hearted action/comedy/disaster movie, and I recommend you go see it now before the only people left to see it are the boring sort that will not clap and whoop their way through the movie.

Now I’ve got that out of the way, let’s change gears.

I left the movie last night (7.30pm, Cineworld) wondering what it was about this movie that appealed to nerds. The nerd quotient of this movie was unreal. Sitting in Eddie Rockets before the movie, I spotted a group of people going past, and just by the look of them, I knew they had just been to Snakes on a Plane (it turns out that one of them was a Googler who knew the Googler in our group and indeed, he had just been to Snakes on a Plane).

The internet is abuzz with this movie in a way that only the internet knows how. Livejournal is unreadable right now because of it. There are multi-page threads about it on every forum I read. And NewsFire tells me I have a terrifying 50 articles about it in my RSS feeds.

So why this movie? What makes it better than other light-hearted action/comedy/disaster movies? Sure, SoaP has a guy getting bitten on the cock by a snake after pissing on it (oops, spoilers!), but Deep Blue Sea has Samuel L. Jackson being eaten by a flying shark (kinda). SoaP may be high-concept, but then, so is Remo: Unarmed and Dangerous, whose similarly endearing concept is stratospheric and too bizarre to properly summarize here.

So why Snakes on a Plane? Answers on a postcard, please.