Movie review: Train to Busan (2016)
Anyone who knows me well will be shocked to hear me give a positive review not just of a horror flick, but of a zombie-apocalypse film! I've never really felt a part of the whole zombie zeitgeist, and so never went out of my way to see any zombie movies, even ones with Bill Murray in them.
Before we go on, allow me first to make a plug for libraries. The modern library is so much more than a place to borrow a book. You may be aware that folks have for some time been able to borrow audio-books and DVDs, but get this! Anyone with a library card nowadays can also stream movies for free (up to four per month), in the comfort of their own home. Get the complete scoop at hooplaDigital.com, which is how I'd come to enjoy this amazing movie, Train to Busan.
In retrospect, I guess my choosing this film must have had something to do with the week's activities.
On the Wednesday following Thanksgiving, I'd caught a red-eye from San Francisco, having come from visiting friends who live on California's north coast, and had only been home here in Austin about ten minutes when I received this text from a friend: Come on down, act like a casualty in a National Guard training exercise, $100 a day! In spite of not having slept on the flight (where I devoured back issues of the New Yorker before settling in to watch 2017's Star Wars: The Last Jedi), down I went.
The work lasted four days, during which myself and more than 100 others - many of them professional actors - would don thrift-store clothes, and then get made up with fake injuries. The word for this - moulage - is from French, and refers to "the art of applying mock injuries for the purpose of training medical or military personnel". (Perhaps more on this another time.) Believe it or not, watching Train to Busan (Korean, 1 hr. 58 m) was how I chose to celebrate being done with acting like a disaster-victim!
The film starts out leisurely, drawing us gradually into the domestic routines of the handsome, divorced hedge-fund manager Seok-woo (played by Gong Yoo) who lives with his mother and his too-cute-for-words little daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an), who wants nothing more for her birthday than to take the train to see her mom (giving the film its title; the trailer's here).
It's after the first quarter-hour that the film takes off, when Su-an, ensconced as their train is getting under way in her window-seat next to her already dozing dad, glimpses a station attendant being suddenly tackled by .. something. And then, like the unfortunate passengers on the train, the viewer has nothing else to do except buckle in, and hope s/he makes it till the end!
I won't go into much detail about the rest of the plot, and will only add here that I was really pleased with the characters as well as the dialog. I choose to watch more foreign films because I feel that foreign studios do a better job of representing the way people are, as opposed to the way movies coming out of Hollywood portray the actions and words of characters based on the studio's marketing department's conception of what they believe American audiences will respond to.
So, to give a single example: Su-an's dad, Seok-woo, has gone running off to check on something, momentarily leaving his girl in the company of fellow passenger Sang-hwa (played by Ma Dong-seok), described in the wiki article about the film as a "tough, working-class man", who is traveling with his pregnant wife Seong-kyeong.
He says to Su-an: Hey, is that your dad? It is. What's he do? Su-an replies He's a fund manager. "So" - he says, in an aside to his wife - "he's a blood-sucker. He leeches off others." His wife quietly rebukes him: Don't say that in front of his child. To which Su-an says, It's okay. It's what everyone's thinking.
This short scene only gets better as the soon-to-be-mom then strokes her big belly, introducing Su-an to the new life inside of her, and inviting her to touch it. Seong-kyeong pulls out a gummy worm: Want some? It's what Sleepy eats. "Baby's name is Sleepy?" No, that's the fetus' name. It's like a nickname. Her dad's too lazy to come up with a nickname yet.
Not long after this comes one of the best lines in the film: Sang-hwa prepares to lead Seok-woo and a high-school baseball player to rescue folks in another car. Before they depart, Sang-hwa tosses him a baseball bat and says I heard you're a fund manager. You're clearly an expert at leaving useless people behind before leaving the safety of their own car to deal with the zombies who scrambled aboard at the previous stop.
Dialog like that, unlikely to be heard in an American film, is just one of several reasons you must not fail to see Train to Busan. If it were not for my feeling during the final third of the film that 10 or 15 minutes of zombies running hither and yon could've been cut without anyone's noticing, I would've given this film a solid 5 out of 5 stars.
I was not aware of director Yeon Sang-ho before, but having read the wiki article about him and his career, he is certainly someone whose work I will be looking for in the days to come: making animation targeted at adults with dark, controversial themes that brutally and incisively explore human nature and social realism: my kinda guy.
Before we go on, allow me first to make a plug for libraries. The modern library is so much more than a place to borrow a book. You may be aware that folks have for some time been able to borrow audio-books and DVDs, but get this! Anyone with a library card nowadays can also stream movies for free (up to four per month), in the comfort of their own home. Get the complete scoop at hooplaDigital.com, which is how I'd come to enjoy this amazing movie, Train to Busan.
In retrospect, I guess my choosing this film must have had something to do with the week's activities.
On the Wednesday following Thanksgiving, I'd caught a red-eye from San Francisco, having come from visiting friends who live on California's north coast, and had only been home here in Austin about ten minutes when I received this text from a friend: Come on down, act like a casualty in a National Guard training exercise, $100 a day! In spite of not having slept on the flight (where I devoured back issues of the New Yorker before settling in to watch 2017's Star Wars: The Last Jedi), down I went.
 |
| moulage |
The film starts out leisurely, drawing us gradually into the domestic routines of the handsome, divorced hedge-fund manager Seok-woo (played by Gong Yoo) who lives with his mother and his too-cute-for-words little daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an), who wants nothing more for her birthday than to take the train to see her mom (giving the film its title; the trailer's here).
It's after the first quarter-hour that the film takes off, when Su-an, ensconced as their train is getting under way in her window-seat next to her already dozing dad, glimpses a station attendant being suddenly tackled by .. something. And then, like the unfortunate passengers on the train, the viewer has nothing else to do except buckle in, and hope s/he makes it till the end!
I won't go into much detail about the rest of the plot, and will only add here that I was really pleased with the characters as well as the dialog. I choose to watch more foreign films because I feel that foreign studios do a better job of representing the way people are, as opposed to the way movies coming out of Hollywood portray the actions and words of characters based on the studio's marketing department's conception of what they believe American audiences will respond to.
 |
| Kim Su-an plays a fund manager's daughter |
He says to Su-an: Hey, is that your dad? It is. What's he do? Su-an replies He's a fund manager. "So" - he says, in an aside to his wife - "he's a blood-sucker. He leeches off others." His wife quietly rebukes him: Don't say that in front of his child. To which Su-an says, It's okay. It's what everyone's thinking.
This short scene only gets better as the soon-to-be-mom then strokes her big belly, introducing Su-an to the new life inside of her, and inviting her to touch it. Seong-kyeong pulls out a gummy worm: Want some? It's what Sleepy eats. "Baby's name is Sleepy?" No, that's the fetus' name. It's like a nickname. Her dad's too lazy to come up with a nickname yet.
Not long after this comes one of the best lines in the film: Sang-hwa prepares to lead Seok-woo and a high-school baseball player to rescue folks in another car. Before they depart, Sang-hwa tosses him a baseball bat and says I heard you're a fund manager. You're clearly an expert at leaving useless people behind before leaving the safety of their own car to deal with the zombies who scrambled aboard at the previous stop.
Dialog like that, unlikely to be heard in an American film, is just one of several reasons you must not fail to see Train to Busan. If it were not for my feeling during the final third of the film that 10 or 15 minutes of zombies running hither and yon could've been cut without anyone's noticing, I would've given this film a solid 5 out of 5 stars.
I was not aware of director Yeon Sang-ho before, but having read the wiki article about him and his career, he is certainly someone whose work I will be looking for in the days to come: making animation targeted at adults with dark, controversial themes that brutally and incisively explore human nature and social realism: my kinda guy.
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