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I kept hearing good things about this one but we had never gotten around to actually watching it. Train to Busan was Korean cinema’s 2016 submission to the zombie apocalypse genre, and eight years later Dawn and I gave it a whirl after finding it available on one of our streaming channels. I don’t remember which one, although I’m fairly sure it wasn’t Disney Plus.
I’ve said before that there are no new stories under the sun, only riffs and recombinations of ones that have come before — and the closer you hew to recognizable tropes the more skilled you have to be at the contents. Busan has some definite moments but overall I may have just seen one too many zombie flicks to have really gotten into it despite the novelty of the non-American locale and managing to keep the confines of a passenger train suspenseful when there’s literally (and figuratively) very little room to maneuver. You can tick off the check boxes of characters and plot points and even in 2016 the “turn you in seconds” fast zombies on display here had already been seen in the Dawn of the Dead remake, 28 Days Later, World War Z, etc.
It’s not bad. I wouldn’t even say it’s mediocre, it’s just I think because of the above it didn’t grab me and sink its teeth into my neck the way I was led to believe it might. What is it with zombies and necks, anyhow? Shouldn’t that be more of a vampire thing? Perhaps a topic for a future blog.
There’s a guy who picks up a zombie and uses it as a battering ram to hold other zombies back, though. He’s cool. And like I said there are some other memorable and creative moments even if it doesn’t stay far from the well-trodden path. Or um, well… it’s on rails?
Yeah, I’ll see myself out. Welcome to Team Paranoid, Oscar! Spoiler alert: they really are out to getcha!