2016 Korean horror, dir. Yeon Sang-ho; Gong Yoo, Kim Su-an;
IMDb /
allmovie. There's an
extra passenger aboard the express. (Vtt Busanhaeng or 부산행.)
This is why I don't think that my poor reaction to Rec is just
a matter of this style of film not being for me: this is similarly a
story about fast zombies chowing down on people mostly in a confined
space, but I enjoyed it much more. An early moment when Dad driving
his daughter to the train is nearly run off the road by a convoy of
fire engines, a clear signal that something has gone very wrong in the
world even if there aren't any emergency announcements yet, left me
much more in sympathy with the film than I expected to be.
Yes, basically there are Good People and Bad People, and even if the
bad people do all come to a bad end so do most of the good people. In
that sense, it feels like a descendant of the box-picture disaster
film, like The Poseidon Adventure or The Towering Inferno.
Characters are broadly drawn: the me-over-everyone-else company man,
the high school sportsball player and his girlfriend, the two elderly
sisters, and so on. But it's also interesting to see the company man
being the first to jump to lifeboat thinking about who's most
expendable; to see dad morality colliding with kid morality (she's
young enough to believe all that stuff about being kind to people that
dad has forgotten); and there's even a pregnant woman who doesn't go
into labour during the film!
I think what really impressed me, though, was the use of sets: not
just the obvious linearity of the train, but also the linearity of
station corridors and stairways, where once you've entered a segment
you can only keep going or turn back (and the latter is hard if you've
got a mob of fellow victims pressing you on). There's the sense of a
mass of zombies as was done a few years earlier in World War Z:
not just one or two but hundreds, pressing others forward with their
own bodies.
Also there is a truly superb train crash.
I'm not a convert who will now seek out more zombie films to watch,
but I did very much enjoy this. People make their heroic sacrifices or
get killed being cowardly, and they're people we've met and got to
like (if briefly), so what happens to them matters; it's not just an
excuse to show off more gore effects.
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.
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