Train to Busan (Sang-ho Yeon)

[Irish]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt5700672/

This is playing at limited theatres in the US right now.

Also, I know it's the wrong forum. Obliged if a mod would move.

[Stay Puft]

Well since you made a thread for it, I figured somebody from MC should check it out. It probably shouldn't have been me, though. I'm tired of zombies. (I actually thought this was a disaster movie at first, I had no idea what it was about.)

It's well mounted, and some parts are pretty cool, but it's so content to merely simmer in zombie movie clichés that I became increasingly restless and bored, predicting every beat and rolling my eyes. There are some plot developments near the end that just seemed baffling and pointless, but thinking about it more, there's something a little sloppy about the whole affair. The way the infected girl first gets on the train, and the events surrounding that, for example... there's one shot that seems to imply she sneaks on, and the conductor dude doesn't see her, but the way that shot is staged and blocked, you'd never guess how that was possible. See also: when they're holding the door against the horde in the train station. That part was pretty damn dumb.

My favorite part was randomly seeing a Wonder Girl on the big screen. I knew she had left the group to pursue an acting career, but I think this is the first time I've ever seen her in anything. She was okay, I guess. Not better or worse than anybody else in the movie, and her character is basically nothing anyways... like the rest of the movie.

It's not bad and I can see zombie fans enjoying it (the audience I was with was eating it up, screaming during a few parts and a few people were even sobbing during one particular dramatic scene) but I was a largely unmoved. All I could muster was a shrug.

[Peng]

Oh this is a tough one to rate or rank, since its virtues and missteps are so different, almost independent from each other, and very, very strong in their own way.


First, the bad: the melodrama is semi-insufferable, with the director deciding its mode should be on fits of hysterics most of the time; many actors' charm and skill can help it only halfway through (although the final big bit of drama surprisingly works, thanks to Gong Yoo). The film compounds it even more by deciding on a villain -- why oh why do some think we need to have one in a pic like this? -- who impressively is the most hysterical and melodramatic character by far in his thematically blunt villainy. He might as well have a bright, permanent neon sign above his head saying 'Here's the dark side of human nature when in crisis!' Just grating.


But oh how the good is just the best: the zombies, the set-pieces, the action. Melodramatic though many characters may be, but most are smart, which is really gratifying for this genre. The director is also very inventive in the logistics of how they will meet, evade, fight, and hide from the zombies, with clear, fluidly shot spatial relation that make the situations even more intense. It's just so relentless and exciting, with welcome doses of humor and heroics in between to prevent the story from plunging into too grim. The film might be very flawed, it surpasses Green Room for mein having the best action of the year, bar none. Not that it has much competition in the mainstream-deficit 2016...

[number8]

I kinda liked that it keeps putting the characters in a "close the door to save yourself or hold it open to save others" situation every 10 minutes. It's repetitive as hell as a suspense mechanism, but it's so dogged in pursuing that moral exploration that it becomes a rather fascinating motif that grounds the film throughout the massive CGI spectacle and shrill melodrama. Almost every set piece revolves around the opening and closing of doors, and that's a pretty neat conceit. It also what makes the one-note villain guy work for me, because he's also centered around that same choice ([

Show Spoiler

the conductor's death in particular is a hilarious variation of it

]).

The homage to Night of the Living Dead at the end that inverts it is a little weird.

[Grouchy]

Agreed with 8, the single-mindedness with which the movie makes it all about the moral choices of the characters is the one thing that makes it stand out. Otherwise, it's a standard zombie flick, although as those go it's still pretty damn entertaining.

I also caught the subtle reference / almost parody to Night of the Living Dead in the ending scene.

[Dukefrukem]

Believe it or not, this is the movie that made me realize how sick I am of zombies.

[Henry Gale]

See, this worked so well for me because, like all the best films in the subgenre, I barely even see it as a zombie story (with incidental people and situations falling under that banner). It does what any great work that employs genre should do, and that's use the staples we know and understand to pin new characters and ideas into a corner to bring out the most vivid, overt and true versions of them, testing them against the most intense circumstances to reveal ultimate truths. With Korean cinema already being maybe the least self-conscious and most emotionally heightened of any region's film output, it's a perfect marriage of this horror lane to the sorts of sensibilities that have allowed so many movies about much less overtly life-and-death circumstances to feel just as insane and vital to now be applied to a story with manic undead chasing people here.

It's also two things very few stories in the zombie genre manage to be amongst their hopeless dourness, and that's that it's very funny and subsequently incredibly, gut-punchingly emotional in all the right place. (I always have this theory -- at least for my own tastes -- that the darker something is, the funnier it has the opportunity to be, and the funnier something is, the more relatable and emotionally invested I am in it.) Those two extremes of hilarity and heartbreak hardly ever seem to be properly calibrated in zombie stories where the only destination seems to be inevitable death. Without the right sense of hope and humour, stories like this suffer (probably why I checked out of The Walking Dead ages ago, and revisiting it for last year's finale and this year's premiere confirmed those fears), but this nails it.

In easy summary: I laughed and I cried. New milestone of both K-cinema and Z-cinema in my eyes.

It'll just miss my Top 10, but I really did love it. More and more as it went, even. (In my 2016 ranking, it currently happens to fall right under Green Room and The Handmaiden, which will remain my favourite film involving holding doors to keep monsters out from the year, and my favourite film from South Korea of the year, respectively.)

[Rico]

Despite it's flaws, it also managed to be one of the more intense movies of the year.

[Skitch]

A mild yay for good filmmaking, but a nay for enjoyment. That one asshole lived entirely waaaaaay too long.

Better ending: [

Show Spoiler

Dad chains himself to the train, flips over railing, shoves his hand under wheels slicing it off. The trio enter the dark tunnel to Busan on foot, roll credits.

]

[Philip J. Fry]

Well, as a relative noob to the zombie subgenre, this... worked well for me. The train works well creating tension and claustrophobia, that one guy with the distant daughter became a better person... and then a zombie; the badass with the pregnant wife was a badass for a while and that one slimeball guy who got almost everyone killed by being the most selfish prick ever. I had fun.