It’s that time of year again! Time to celebrate the Resurrection with a weeklong plunge into all things zombie! Here’s the history: In 2008, Dr. Girlfriend and I decided to spend a week or so each year marathoning through zombie films that we’d never seen before, and I would blog short reviews. And simple as that, the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon was born.
For the curious, here are links to 2008, 2009 (a bad year), 2010, 2011, 2012 (when we left the blog behind), 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020.
Welcome back, you heathens! Before we get started, I want to mention that we are also watching the Brazilian adaptation of Dead Set, Reality Z, but we’ll be watching one episode per day until the end of the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon, so I’ll write up a review of that once we’re all finished up. So that means, to kick off the 2021 Quarantine Edition of the Easter Zombie Movie Marathon, Dr. Girlfriend and I queued up the 2020 sequel to the 2016 instant classic, Train to Busan (and its animated prequel, Seoul Station), Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula.
This film had a budget of approximately $16 million (up from the almost $9 million of Train to Busan), and co-writer (with Ryu Yong-jae) and director Sang-ho Yeon has done his best to expand the Train to Busan-iverse in a way that really didn’t please many of the fans of the first film. Granted, it doesn’t have the straight-forward plot and the easily identifiable emotional core of the original, but this one’s all about world building while pulling in some John Wick / Fury Road energy. It’s bigger, a little dumb, but has a great Escape from New York vibe that really resonated with me.
After a prologue set during the original film and the evacuation of South Korea (an event that goes horribly, if predictably, wrong), Peninsula jumps to four years later (real time for viewers) and we focus on our protagonists, Captain Jung-Seok (Dong-won Gang) and his brother-in-law Chul-min (Do-yoon Kim) living with the guilt of losing their family while trying to get out of the country. Living in Hong Kong, they don’t really have much going for them until a local gangster recruits them and a couple of others to return to the quarantined peninsula to retrieve a truck carrying US $20 million, promising them half the bounty if they return alive.
And just like that, we’re in motion.
I can understand a lot of the bad reviews and the hurt feelings. Train to Busan burst out of nowhere and wowed audiences with its heart and its non-stop adrenaline-fueled zombie action. This is not that film. But at the same time, Peninsula is maybe even more non-stop adrenaline-fueled than the first film, with a shit-ton of car-fu and a climactic car chase through zombie-infested streets that was clearly indebted to George Miller, all set against a backdrop of post-apocalyptic hedonism, amoral violence, and suicidal ennui.
If this were touted as a sequel to something like Zombieland or Little Monsters, or even something like Dead Snow, audiences wouldn’t have blinked an eye. Especially with Jung-Seok’s John Wick-style effectiveness with a gun.
There’s a bit more CG involved in this film, since we’re dealing with larger scale storytelling, and some of the physics of the car-fu was questionable (for those unfamiliar, car-fu is the ancient art of beating people’s or zombies’ assess with a car – a skill few possess), but damn if it wasn’t fun.
The politics of the apocalyptic city were a little unclear, too. Like, I’m not sure how Captain Seo (Kyo-hwan Koo) is in charge, when his lead soldier, Sergeant Hwang (Min-Jae Kim) is basically operating without much of a leash. Seems like he could take over anytime he wants. Maybe he just doesn’t want the responsibility? Anyway, Seo is suicidal and sees the arrival of a truckful of money and the promise of getting off the peninsula as reason enough to abandon everyone there and skip town leaving the other survivors with no food or hope.
Meanwhile, Chul-min has been captured by Hwang and as one might expect, is thrown into a gladiatorial arena. Sort of. Having recently seen this same sort of thing in CBS’s adaptation of Stephen King’s The Stand, I have to say Peninsula pulls it off with more flair and originality. Two minutes is put on the clock and a gaggle of zombies are set loose on a group of prisoners constrained in what may be a drained indoor pool. When the two minutes are up, the surviving prisoners are allowed back into their locked trailer, tossed some dry ramen noodles, and get to wait for the next round.
The real heart of the film, though, is with the narrative path Jung-Seok follows. Just as he’s about to be killed by hordes of the undead, he is rescued by two young girls with more bad-ass driving skills than anyone you know. The driver, Jooni (Re Lee) and her younger sister Yu-Jin (Ye-Won Lee) are a breath of fresh air and a blast of light. And as good as Jooni is at driving, Yu-Jin is with her remote-control cars. Their mom, Min Jung (Lee Jung-hyun) has kept them alive for the past four years, and as luck would have it, she also happens to be a woman that Jung-Seok left behind during the evacuation.
There’s a ton of guilt coursing through this film’s veins, but it doesn’t weigh it down. I found the melodrama, action, and horror to be pretty well-balanced and they even gave us a happy ending for a change. I’d happily return to the Train to Busan-iverse, if Sang-ho Yeon was planning another excursion, if only to see what spin on the genre he puts on it with a fourth installment. Having brought in a worldwide gross of $42.7 million, I think there’s a distinct possibility of another follow-up sometime in the future.