Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula Review

Four years after Yeon Sang-ho’s thrilling Train to Busan, filled with carnage, a standalone sequel takes place in the same South Korean zompocalypse universe. With the story also advanced by four years, Peninsula, which is what the quarantined undead nation is now called, will escape the great New York City, giving up much of the privacy and the close-knit anxiety that Train to Busan served. Of course, bigger doesn’t mean better, naturally, or weaker. Peninsula works well, and you can’t fault someone for wanting to expand the scope of a story and widen the sandbox – it worked great for the Purge series – but the film’s journey into hyper- action and stepped up Fast and Furious franchise-style chase sequences, sometimes working against the narrative, pulling us away from zombie horror and emotional stakes.

The Heart in the Chaos Center of Peninsula isn’t quite as moving or effective as the father / daughter struggle of the previous film, but Peninsula has a pulse. Even though the playing field is now the entire ravaged and carved out port city of Incheon, we are still given the smaller, character-centric story of a former sea captain, Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won). , who is haunted, years later, by those he failed to save and those he outright ignored during his exodus from South Korea during the zombie outbreak.

In the grip of the survivor’s guilt, Jung-seok is offered a high-risk job, along with his brother-in-law and two other scavengers, to return to the Peninsula and recover a lost pile of cash. It’s a color-by-number redemption story, but Sang-ho embellished it nicely with a quick overnight jaunt into hell itself. Zombie stories are always about tough choices and the almost impossible challenge of doing the “right” thing. That’s why even slightly derivative stories, like Peninsula, can still work at very basic and cliché levels.

Peninsula doesn’t exactly shoot an Alien 3 on Su-an and Seong-kyeong from Train to Busan, although a flurry of reporting at the top of the film lets us know how quickly South Korea has fallen, including Busan, which is mentioned as a place where people the thought was sure during the first days of the crisis, but ultimately not. There is a decent amount of leeway here for the viewer to imagine that these two have settled down somewhere safe. But all of this was not meant to dash our hopes against the rocks as much as to explode and detonate the saga into an international affair.

Settling things years later too, for better or for worse, makes zombies – who in this world’s case are night-blind, rapidly transforming, rapidly evolving demons – a bit after the fact. Like most ghoulish timelines involving zombies, the longer people live in a wasteland, the more adept they become at killing and / or containing monsters. Then the real threat becomes the others. Those who have lived by their own laws (or lack thereof) to get by and survive. Peninsula is no different in that the real surprise when Jung-seok and his crew arrive in Incheon is not the grim surplus of zombies, but the real people who were abandoned in the city and who have now formed their own. violent and cruel society. Including – yeah – a Thunderdome type of zombie game where victims are forced to survive a flesh-ripper attack.

However, Jung-seok doesn’t just encounter terrible crooks and creeps (played by Kim Min-jae and Koo Kyo-hwan). No, his redemptive fate throws him into the orbit of Min-jung of Lee Jung-hyun and his daughters (with the eldest, Joon of Lee Re, being a fantastic apocalypse pilot). Once everyone, good and bad, realizes that the money and Jung-seok’s coastal touch could mean rescue, it becomes a scoops-up-the-wall mix of a shoot-em-up, of a heist and a Fury Road death race. Those looking for a claustrophobic creepfest like the last movie (or the last of them If you count Yeon Sang-ho’s bustling Seoul resort as the first chapter of this story) may feel disappointed with the outrageous Peninsula upgrade, but on its own, the film is a fun, noisy ride through a minefield of chaos.