Train To Busan (10th Anniversary)

Zombie movies. Thanks to Danny Boyle's unreasonably popular 28 Days Later (2002), we were buried in them for, well, about 17 years. How do I pinpoint the death at 17 years? The year Jim Jarmusch makes a movie in a genre (The Dead Don't Die, 2019) that constitutes the death of that genre. 

I don't make the rules. I just make up random statement and claim they're rules.

At the tail end of the zombie spike, however, Korean director Yeon Sang-ho delivered Train To Busan, which broke no boundaries, provided no revelations, subverted no expectations—it was just really, really good. 

The story is both bog-standard and very Korean. Greedy and corrupt Seok-woo (Gong Yoo, "Squid Game) gets browbeaten into taking his ridiculously cute daughter Soo-An (Kim Su-An, Along With Gods: The Two Worlds) to be with her mother in Busan. Seok-woo and the mother are separated, because Seok-woo is a jerk, who neglects his daughter and demands custody...I don't know, he's just that greedy and trying to prove his soon-to-be-ex wrong.

He exploits his own mother to care for Soo-An, and while she loves spending time with her granddaughter, she's aware of how much Soo-An wants her actual mother.

Got the set up? Good.

Now, add zombies.

Seok-woo gets on the train with Soo-An, and we meet a variety of characters. In fact, it's such a conspicuous variety of characters, the movie feels more like a classic Irwin Allen disaster flick than a zombie movie. We've got the really rich guy, the old lady friends, the sports team (with cheerleaders), and Ma Dong-seok as working guy with pregnant wife (girlfriend?) who has no use for the likes of financial traders like Seok-woo.

I'd say this sort of thing is easy, like you might say watching Die Hard (1988): Good guys, bad guys, the good guys got problems beyond the bad guys, and they learn to overcome them while fighting off a menace. Terrorists, zombies, it doesn't matter. 

I'd say it's easy, but it's clearly not, since it's rarely done well.

The plot serves its purpose. It gives the people a reason to endanger themselves, to endanger others, to generally keep this from being just "trapped on mass transit with zombies". So, what makes it better than other, similar films?

Well, for one thing, the characters. They're stock, for sure, but you don't need a lot of intricate background in a movie like this. The cast is likable and attractive—Koreans like good-looking and charismatic people in their films—without feeling unrealistic. Two of the major players are a very cute cheerleader and the athlete she has set her cap on, and while they're doing that Asian thing of the-boy-pretends-to-be-uninterested, this goes out the window pretty fast, and when the zombies arrive, the two act like a unit.

It's all kind of like that: The stress is a catalyst for the main characters to come together, and it gives our protagonist a chance to redeem himself. 

That's oddly "nice", for lack of a better word. Especially in a zombie flick. 

On this stable base, Yeon Sang-Ho gives us zombies on the level of World War Z. There are masses of fast-moving hordes, and the sheer mass has a character all of its own. And while there's CGI here, the individual zombies are not foot-draggers: They're dancers (I believe) who are moving in very inhuman ways. 

There's a point in this kind of story where the heroes discover the zombies' weaknesses. The weaknesses themselves are fine, but more than that they're used to good advantage. Everything fits together and our characters do the best they can with the information they have, but it's still a horror flick: Anyone can die at any time.

Still, it's practically an uplifting movie. It's what you'd expect at the end of a genre: A kind of perfect distillation of elements that make future efforts seem almost pointless.