You need Train to Busan in Your Life

There are few things more beautiful than a genre movie which transcends its boundaries and defies all your expectations and preconceptions.

I must admit, when Train to Busan slipped into my Netflix recommendations brandishing a ‘zombie outbreak’ descriptor, I instantly dismissed it without bothering to watch.  What could this movie have to offer that other movies hadn’t done, and done better?

‘Snowpiercer with zombies’ is a sentence with far too many shavings from the bottom of the barrel in it for my liking.

Zombies have become the new vampire: they are ubiquitous and (for the most part) unoriginal.  Walking Dead begat iZombie begat Santa Clarita Diet begat too many other shows and movies to count.  Almost all of them, with the rare exception of Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland, have been completely brain-dead descents into visceral revenge fantasies where we can indiscriminately murder our fellow humans without needing to feel guilty about it.

After the first ten minutes of Train to Busan had double-tapped every preconception I had brought with me into the movie, I realized that I was about to receive an action-oriented think-piece akin to the psychological thrillers of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead instead of the mind-numbing plotless, violence-laden gore festival that was World War Z.  Seriously, I vastly prefer focusing on the positive when it comes to art, but that movie was a travesty ESPECIALLY because it’s source material was some of the best post-apocalyptic writing to date.  They were gifted the most advantageous starting point imaginable and still managed to faceplant spectacularly.  Yikes.

I found, as the minutes piled into hours, that director Yeon Sang-Ho and writer Joo-Suk Park were aware of all the baggage which came with making a genre film and were more than up to the challenge before them.  With the help of a gifted cast and outrageously good camera work, they delivered a story full of meaning and heft which also offered up an opinion on the following list of themes:

Redemption, the role of the father, what it means to be a good parent, what it means to be a good person, social stratification and the myopic world-views it infects those at the top with, love, sacrifice, honor, personal growth, and also the second and third order consequences for our actions and how we cannot escape them.

Oh, and that list is hardly exhaustive.  They cram a lot into the two hour run time.

I was so very, very wrong to dismiss this movie.  I could not be more ecstatic to share with you just how wrong I was, and to prove to both you and my past-self exactly why this fantastic film is worth your time.

Train to Busan is an absolutely evocative adrenaline soaked thrill-ride which grabs hold and will not let go.  You will not be able to tear your eyes from the screen because it does exactly what the best post-apocalyptic movies do: Make you care about the characters dying within it.

Yeah, you read that right.  The sign of a good movie with zombies taking over everywhere is making us care that they’re taking over everywhere.  It’s what movies like 2004’s remake Dawn of the Dead and everything George Romero ever touched got right:

The apocalypse isn’t the story, it’s just the setting you’re using to tell the actual story.

Enter our protagonist Seok-woo, a man who is so grossly incapable of self-reflection and change that it takes a freaking zombie apocalypse to snap him out of the destructive tailspin which is slowly smothering everyone in his life.

Along the way, Seok-woo is confronted again and again with the darker aspects of his own nature and forced to overcome them.  It is only through the intervention and untimely deaths of others that he can finally understand everything which has been driving a wedge between himself and others.

Woven throughout all of this is an action movie less interested in cheap jump scares and more interested in the raw, visceral terror that being trapped on a train with a bunch of zombies would instill.

While gore is plentiful, it’s never so over-the-top that you become removed from the story.  Yes, the movie has a TV-MA rating, but it does not revel in its own brutality:  This is not Saw with zombies, I promise you that much.

If you enjoy your horror films which have a heart, if you’re into action movies with a purpose, then I cannot recommend Train to Busan enough.  The movie flows with fantastic pacing and energy, and every single payoff feels earned instead of slapped on.  The ending will make you laugh and cry in the same breath, all while leaving you with a confusing mixture of hope and despair.

I’ll give all of you a chance to watch the movie, but after that I’ve got a deep, spoiler-riddled discussion of the themes in store which demand their own post.

Trainfully,

The Unsheathed Quill