Train to Busan is the movie for these bizarre times
It turns out zombies really can’t be killed. The Walking Dead has been on forever, and it seems like a new zombie apocalypse movie/tv series premieres every month. Please, there are zombie romcoms. The Korean blockbuster Train to Busan by Yeon Sang-Ho takes all the tropes of zombie movies and throws them onto a speeding train, where the living must fight their way through cars packed with the frothing infected. The characters and the situations are familiar—you know exactly who will live and who will die—but the filmmakers make us care about the people, and then they execute the set pieces so well (with clever updates on the genre, such as the tunnel scenes), that they make the undead feel fresh and new.
There’s something for everybody: action, melodrama, comedy, tears and singing. It’s a great crowd pleaser—at a Sunday afternoon screening the audience shrieked, yelped, laughed, sobbed, and scared themselves silly. Train to Busan reminds us that cinema is a communal experience. Like that other terrific train movie, Bong Joon-Ho’s Snowpiercer, it lends itself to all sorts of interpretation. Class, economics, migration and refugees, crowds and chaos, survival and altruism, game theory—knock yourself out.
Often, life in 2016 feels like Train to Busan: beset on all sides by brain-eating killers.
Watch it.
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