Train to Busan

Something is slightly wrong at Seoul Station.  Passengers waiting to board the KTX, a high-speed bullet train, to Busan glimpse some ragged sick-looking people wandering around the edges of the platform.  Something darts down an escalator.  Out of the corner of your eye, you see a fracas that looks a like a brawl among beggars.  And, on the train, there's a girl who seems to be a  junkie squatting in the toilet and trying to tie tourniquets around both legs.  A few minutes later, the girl staggers out of the toilet, suffers a violent seizure, and, then, begins biting people.  Of course, she's a zombie and pretty soon the bullet-train racing across Korea is full of slavering undead monsters:  zombies on a high-speed train -- this is the general premise of Yeon Sang-ho's film Train to Busan (2016).  Although I've seen plenty of zombie films, I don't consider myself in an expert in the genre -- I watched a half-dozen episodes of The Walking Dead a few years ago, a program that seemed to consist of a TV soap opera married to a variant of Survivor (which of our contestants will be the last man standing?), people marooned in quarries or scenic-looking abandoned factories debating this or that between periodic sequences of hyper-violent gore.  Train to Busan is extremely exciting, fast-paced and well-made.  And, once the premise is imaginatively accepted by the viewer, the film actually makes reasonable narrative sense -- no one has super-powers nor is any one preternaturally gifted in combat.  There are no guns and so the heroes don't have the convenience of blowing off the zombie's heads at long-range -- in this film, all the desperate action is distinctly hand-to-hand.  The movie hits the sweet spot in that it is scary, but not so scary as to be unpleasant; similarly, the film is gory but not so horrifically gruesome as to be revolting.  Zombie films are escapist entertainment and Train to Busan meets all the expectations of the genre without becoming so dire as to become unwatchable.  Further, the film is surprising -- the director doesn't hesitate to slaughter his movie stars (the very attractive Gong Yoo and Yung Yu-mi among others.)  Accordingly, there is very real suspense as to who will actually survive this zombie apocalypse.

A divorced father has neglected his eight-year old daughter Su-An.  When she was called upon to sing in her classroom, daddy wasn't present and so she "choked" -- strangely, she was trying to sing "Alohe Oe."  Su-An's father is some kind of hedge fund manager and he has invested heavily in a bio-tech company performing sinister experiments that, of course, go badly awry.  His daughter wants to see her mother in Busan and, so, the father and daughter board the KTX train to that city on the southeast coast of South Korea.  Traveling with them on the train are a baseball team with its comely cheerleader, an aggressive businessman, a hoodlum with his pregnant girlfriend, and two old ladies who are sisters.   There are a host of others but by the third reel all of them are ravening zombies.  The ever-diminishing group of survivors fights off the zombies who ultimately take over the train.  At last, the KTX reaches Busan where, supposedly, the military is in control.  The song "Aloha Oe" is repeated, this time in an intensely dramatic setting, and the film ends with the last of the train's remaining human passengers saved by the Korean army.  The plot is formulaic -- in fact, there isn't much of a plot but merely a series of situations in which the human survivors have to repel the zombies or battle other passengers who, in this dog-eat-dog, have abandoned all decency in their desperate battle to survive.  The film is efficiently staged with long single-take combat scenes in the claustrophobic train compartments and there is lots of clever stuff including taking advantage of tunnels to distract and elude the dim-witted but multitudinous zombies.  Although I didn't see the film, apparently some effects are reminiscent of World War Z (2013) -- the zombies charge around like herds of wildebeest and, if one of them trips, there is a huge cascade of bodies as all of the monsters stumble over one another.  When zombies in an overhead skyway bust through the glass windows, they fall in huge clumps out of the air, crashing onto the pavement and, then, hopping to their feet to continue their rampage.  In one scene, a couple of zombies seize the back of a locomotive and are dragged over the tracks, more and more zombies jumping on the backs of the others until the train is pulling a fifty-foot long (in)human carpet of writhing monsters.  All of this is pretty spectacular and film has a number of impressively staged action sequences.  There is one frightening sequence in which a horde of zombies on a crashed and burning train are only a yard or so away from several of the survivors who are caught in a tiny space between the smashed and fiery rolling stock.  I also admired the opening sequence in which Korean truck driver at an eerie checkpoint drives away only to hit a deer.  The camera lingers on the deer which suddenly rises spastically off the pavement, eyes glazed and muzzle darkened with blood, reborn as a zombie-deer.

Train to Busan is enjoyable escapist fare.  If you can tolerate this kind of film, it is one of the best of its kind.  (You can see this picture on Netflix)