P
Pugilistic
Guest
This is for posters who are interested in foreign films, particularly, Korean films as they are certainly some gems in Korean cinema. Unfortunately, this movie isn’t one of them.
Train to Busan is getting a shit ton of hype right now and I’m guessing Korean film heads would want to check this one out eventually. I’m here to say sway you from doing so. The trailer looks interesting, but I actually thought it was a disaster movie. But it’s a zombie flick.
I’m not into zombie movies or Korean attempts at copying Hollywood blockbusters, but people here have been raving about this movie so much that I decided to check it out. To explain it simply, think of it as World War Z and Snowpiercer put together as most of the movie is people fighting zombies in a train. I didn’t like World War Z that much, but that movie is better than Train to Busan.
Overall, not the worst movie I’ve seen, but I would have rather saved my money and time. There are way better zombie movies than this one.
Train to Busan is getting a shit ton of hype right now and I’m guessing Korean film heads would want to check this one out eventually. I’m here to say sway you from doing so. The trailer looks interesting, but I actually thought it was a disaster movie. But it’s a zombie flick.
I’m not into zombie movies or Korean attempts at copying Hollywood blockbusters, but people here have been raving about this movie so much that I decided to check it out. To explain it simply, think of it as World War Z and Snowpiercer put together as most of the movie is people fighting zombies in a train. I didn’t like World War Z that much, but that movie is better than Train to Busan.
The beginning of the movie and the buildup up until they actually show the zombies is well done. They spend a lot of time developing the characters while only hinting at zombies through news reports and such, which seems like the typical way zombie movies start out. In fact, this movie follows a lot of typical western zombie movie tropes and doesn’t really do anything new or different with it. Even the origin of the zombies is your typical bio experiment gone bad. I was hoping that “Korean twist” would be added to it to make it more interesting, but if you’ve seen other zombie movies, you’ve seen this one.
Once the actual zombie attack starts, the movie actually gets worse. There’s a pathetic lack of gore, which takes away from the impact of a person getting bitten by a zombie. You would see a person get torn apart by a zombie and when he/she becomes reanimated, there’s not a scratch, except for some blood. The zombies themselves don’t really look scary and I think the camera shows them way too much, and the whole I’m thinking it’s just a bunch of extras acting as crazy as possible.
The story mostly revolves around this guy and his daughter (the aforementioned little girl) and it’s your typical story of a parent trying their best to keep their kid safe in a chaotic situation. The emotional focal point of the movie is on these two, and despite the buildup in the beginning, it eventually falls flat.
Everything just feels flat in this movie. There’s no weight to the action because you feel the characters will be safe until it is the “right moment” in the movie for them to die. There’s way too many dramatic scenes that you don’t feel the impact in any of them. Too many dramatic slow motion scenes of a guy heroically fighting off the zombies so others could survive. Things just happen with no real weight to them and you find yourself not really caring most of the time. There’s one scene in particular that is so unbelievably corny that it plummeted my already bad rating of the movie. The acting is all over the place, ranging from pretty good (the little girl is convincing) to really bad.
That’s not to say there weren’t some good things. The way the zombies twitched when reanimating was creepy and cool, even if the zombies themselves weren’t. The zombies are a lot like World War Z zombies in that they run frantically and stumble on top of eachother. There were some shots of them doing that that were cool. There’s your typical selfish asshole character that is such a giant dick that you’re waiting for him to die a painful death the whole time. He was one of the best parts of the movie, but once again, *Spoilers: his eventual death feels flat just like everything else.
Once the actual zombie attack starts, the movie actually gets worse. There’s a pathetic lack of gore, which takes away from the impact of a person getting bitten by a zombie. You would see a person get torn apart by a zombie and when he/she becomes reanimated, there’s not a scratch, except for some blood. The zombies themselves don’t really look scary and I think the camera shows them way too much, and the whole I’m thinking it’s just a bunch of extras acting as crazy as possible.
The story mostly revolves around this guy and his daughter (the aforementioned little girl) and it’s your typical story of a parent trying their best to keep their kid safe in a chaotic situation. The emotional focal point of the movie is on these two, and despite the buildup in the beginning, it eventually falls flat.
Everything just feels flat in this movie. There’s no weight to the action because you feel the characters will be safe until it is the “right moment” in the movie for them to die. There’s way too many dramatic scenes that you don’t feel the impact in any of them. Too many dramatic slow motion scenes of a guy heroically fighting off the zombies so others could survive. Things just happen with no real weight to them and you find yourself not really caring most of the time. There’s one scene in particular that is so unbelievably corny that it plummeted my already bad rating of the movie. The acting is all over the place, ranging from pretty good (the little girl is convincing) to really bad.
That’s not to say there weren’t some good things. The way the zombies twitched when reanimating was creepy and cool, even if the zombies themselves weren’t. The zombies are a lot like World War Z zombies in that they run frantically and stumble on top of eachother. There were some shots of them doing that that were cool. There’s your typical selfish asshole character that is such a giant dick that you’re waiting for him to die a painful death the whole time. He was one of the best parts of the movie, but once again, *Spoilers: his eventual death feels flat just like everything else.
Overall, not the worst movie I’ve seen, but I would have rather saved my money and time. There are way better zombie movies than this one.