With its familiar scenario of massed zombies on the offensive against the living, South Korean blockbuster Train to Busan stands or falls on the fresh twists in brings to the table. For director Yeon Sang-ho’s first feature with live actors – previous films The Fake, King of Pigs and Seoul Station were animated – he sets the action on a high-speed train hurtling towards a zombie-free zone on which hordes of zombies are sniffing out the unafflicted. Its prequel, Seoul Station, was also a zombie film and set in the titular train station and its trains. Train to Busan, so to speak, leaves the platform and takes it into the real world. This, then, is its twist.
Train to Busan (부산행) is chock-full of everything expected: an endless tide of over-stimulated CGI zombies; unfussily portrayed characters who create the human element (a divorced, work-focussed father and his daughter – the leads – get close for the first time; a husband protecting his pregnant wife; an amoral older businessman; two elderly sisters); a (predictable) twist ending; relentless pace; terrific special effects. What it lacks, though, is the necessary sense of surprise (beyond a terrifically clunky Burger King product placement, that is). It’s a genre triumph but could have done with the light and shade of 28 Days Later or World War Z’s sense of scope. Nonetheless, the making of a US-made, English-language remake of Train to Busan had been announced.
The home cinema release of the brisk and efficiently exhilarating Train to Busan is thin on extras: a short on-set making-of is accompanied by a trailer for and clips from Seoul Station (it’s on UK home cinema release in April). A featurette on how the film was conceived, its relationship to Seoul Station and the special effects would have been welcome.
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