Train to Busan - Movie Review

Zombies are so overdone. They're everywhere and so often they're just... boring. Like you shoot them in the head and they're dead and because of that they've lost of lot of their scare factor. Recently in the past few seasons of The Walking Dead have I felt real fear for zombies without giving them superpowers or weird traits to them. Earlier this year though I reviewed a South Korean show called Kingdom on Netflix about a zombie outbreak in feudal Korea and it was fantastic, in some ways even better than the original Walking Dead show. I'm hoping for yet another season of it. But before Kingdom... there was Train to Busan.

Train to Busan is South Korean film about a fund manager named Seok-woo, who is convinced by his daughter, Su-an, to visit her mother/ divorced wife for her birthday. As they go to the station though something seems off with reports of riots and soon after they get on the train all hell breaks loose as a zombie outbreak takes many of the passengers. Now they, with a few other living survivors, must band together in order to survive their journey to Busan, possibly the last bastion of life and safety in South Korea. It just isn't the zombies though that are trouble as the survivors become conflicted with each other and it becomes a true test of survival.

Kingdom impressed me great with its use of great writing, fantastic tension and fear, and developed characters. The zombies were not the normal slow, deep moaning monsters that I was used to, but instead were almost fast, bloodthirsty, and rabid for the flesh of the living. The infection was almost always instant or at the most took only a couple minutes for the change to fully occur. They were like a flood, literal waves of undead charging headlong after all those who weren't infected. I got a lot of that in Train to Busan, along with some other qualities. South Korea continually impresses me with their media.

The big eye catcher with this zombie media is the main location. With the survivors all trapped on a train it becomes a very claustrophobic environment with little room to move or defend yourself against the undead. You couldn't escape off the train and you could only go forward or backward along the train. I was so often on my guard when the infected zombies were about because unlike the ones most people know they're very fast acting. We do learn some weaknesses of them through the survivors and some of them were really cleverly written, but even with those and some smart thinking from the living characters I was always worried for most of the characters.

Our main character, Seok-woo, wasn't very likable at first. He mostly thought for himself and he wasn't a very good parent to his daughter before the zombies came. At the start of the movie he buys her a Nintendo Wii when she already had one from Children's Day. Very poor of him. But an apocalypse can bring out the best and worst in people and Seok-woo definitely learns to change as the story progresses. In the beginning I almost would not have minded if he died early in the movie, but as the film kept going I felt more and more interested in him and eventually I was so damn worried he was going to die. Plenty of characters didn't like him at first because of what they could immediately (and rightly) guess about him. But as the situation grows more dire and Seok-woo changes they also change with him. It's incredible how well they develop him and the people around him and that's a sign of fantastic writing!

We also meet characters like Sang-hwa, a strong man with a very caring heart, his pregnant wife Seong-kyeong, a young baseball player named Yong-guk and his friend Jin-hee, a COO named Yon-suk, a homeless man who's watched the zombie eat people, and some other well written survivors. They all are different enough to stand out on their own with positive and negative traits, making them feel more real. It's really great how diverse these characters are, not just in appearance but also in beliefs and personalities. They all had fantastic arcs to them and they felt like real people, which made their actions so damn powerful to me. I was almost tearing up multiple times throughout the movie, but the ending absolutely reduced me to tears. There is just so much to all these characters and I felt for a lot of them. The actors just put on fantastic performances, especially the girl who plays Su-an, she was amazing!

As I mentioned already the situations they are full of conflict. Not just against the zombies, but against each other. There are people who want to saved loved ones and ones who are more interested in themselves or certain people. At least one of these characters was so blinded for their safety that they were willing to put others in danger to save themselves. And yet none of the decisions the characters were making were dumb. Like how in some horror movies one characters walks off alone like an idiot and gets killed or somebody does something that clearly shouldn't be done that attracts the monsters. None of that here. I mean it, the decisions were made based on the characters themselves and what they are as people and I could see real people making similar choices. That, plus how overwhelming the situation of the zombies is throughout the film, can pump viewers full of excitement and anxiety.

Alright, I've been holding it in long enough, I got to talk about the zombies. They're really damn good! The stunt people who have to portray the zombies were incredible with how they had to contort their bodies about and how the damage they took from the survivors! They looked horrifying, disgusting, and feral with the excellent makeup! I have to give a small spoiler for this particular part... There's a moment in the movie where a bunch of zombies grab onto the back of a train and they just pile on top of each other, almost like a carpet of growling dead dragging on the train as if they're trying to slow it down and stop it. That moment made me gape in shock and awe. They might not look very rotted because they're not supposed to in this film, but the absolutely scared the hell out of me! There is just one thing about the zombie outbreak in this movie I feel conflicted about. I can't say though, even if its shown at the very, very start of the movie.

To go with the zombies is the action and sets, which were really strong. There is CGI well placed in the film, but a good portion of the action, especially the humans fighting the zombies, was practical. The CGI was used like a tool, mostly used when there were giant piles of zombies flopping about or breaking through barriers, the rest was actors in makeup getting right up with the living characters. The blows hit hard and the tension was so strong with some moments. The living characters aren't experts at combat, they aren't pro zombie killers in the slightest, so having them face such overwhelming odds and seeing how hard they fought with the limited knowledge brings so much out of this movie.

When I thought the zombie genre was overbloated with poor or average media (besides the newer Walking Dead seasons), Train to Busan pushed all that junk aside, stood on a pedestal, and said, "I'm how you do it right!" The idea of a zombie movie on a train could have easily been awful or something you'd find at the bottom of a bargain bin, but the writing and the characters propel the film to masterful levels of horror and storytelling. So much emotion, conflict, struggle, and character growth mixed in with a real sense of danger and stakes. I love this movie. I love it so much!

Tentative Score: 9.5/10

Definitive Score: 9.75/10

I'm not giving it a high rating because I love zombies. Yes, they were a major enjoyment of the movie but it's the dead we care about in zombie media, but the living. The live characters are the ones bringing it about and are the reason we invest out time in their story. This movie is just so well crafted that even without the zombies I kept feeling so much for what was happening in the movie. I heard there is a sequel called Peninsula. I'll have to check that out one day.