Film Discussion - 2016

16I TRAIN TO BUSAN I Film Discussion

Snowpiercer meets World War Z.

That concept alone was what convinced me on board Train to Busan. I did not plan to go see this movie at all. There were so many films coming out that weekend and I was very busy... I was not in the mood to see a movie from the genre that I thought was already dead. However, positive reviews from friends and acquaintances finally won me over. And there I was, in the cinema, watching the movie...

just a heads-up... my thoughts won't be very well pieced together, but know that it's because this movie is so baffling great it kinda jumbles up my brain.

Train to Busan is a movie about a train that is being overran by zombies. Th main plot is really that simple. By right this movie should be at best simple-minded fun. I did not think i would be so invested in the story.

Yet literally in the first moment of the movie, I was hooked.

There was something different about this movie. The tone of the film is such a far cry from the usual hollywood style that it caught my attention almost instantly. Films are not books. Sometimes just the visual, the atmosphere, the tone are enough to grab you. The messages movies send to you are subconscious and you can't describe what it is in words.

The first scene is supposed to hint at the approaching apocalypse. It shows a truck driver driving to a border where the authority has set up a quarantine. The image of the quarantine... the thick fog... the emptiness of the road... they all add up to form a kind of unspoken tension. Somehow the usual zombie movies fail to capture this.

Before we get into the apocalypse, we are introduced to our main characters. A father and a daughter. Now, like most Zombie films, this movie will set up the characters so that we the audience would care about them enough to fear for them. Once again, the same concept, yet executed so much better here. The relationship is very well set up and not with lengthy expositional dialogue but with minor situations. When there are exposition needed, the actors somehow seem to convey a more realistic set of emotion here than in the hollywood movies. Also the most important part is that from now until they get on the train, that uncomfortable tension from the first scene remains!

Train to Busan is one of the few movies that had induced in me a feeling of wanting to watch the movie to the end but at the same time desperately wanting to leave because of how tense it is. This is achieved through great suspense direction - the lack of music, the cutting on actions, the lingering shots that reveal nothing while leading the audience into expecting something. The movie also keeps the whole outbreak almost a mystery, hence adding to the confusion and claustrophobia of the people on the train.

There are instances of jump cuts and cheap edits that somehow do not come off as cheesy. The special effects are not expensive and yet they are so effective. They speed up the zombie's movement to mimic and unsettlingly inhuman movement. They also use camera angles, zooming in and out to create the feeling of sock when the zombies appear.

Let's talk a bit about the characters. There are many characters in this movie, many storylines that needed to be tackled. By right it should feel overloaded and superficial. Yet the director is so confident in handling the script and the stories. He is so confident in working with the characters that every story weaves in and upon each other smoothly. You would be introduced to this character and a few scenes later you see them again and you're like "Oh yeah, I wonder how that guy's doing". The characters are explored at arms length for the most part but through great writing and magnificent acting, these characters feel more fleshed out even when so little is seen of them. Everyone is relevant. Everyone is human... well, not for long, but you know what I mean. Everyone is desperate, scared, confused... Everyone is essential to the story. There is a main character of sort, but the movie is not concerned with him. The movie is concerned with everyone. Our main character, a fund manager and a dad is accompanied by a little girl – his daughter. She's a vulnerable little thing, but she doesn't serve merely as that. She's not just the girl in the horror movie – she's a growing character with motivations and stories. The dad is sort-of a typical asshole, but you know the movie is supposed to provide him with a path to redemption. There's a homeless guy in the movie – he's all cracked out and weird. In a typical blockbuster, he may become a brooding badass. This movie shamelessly subverts that expectation. He's a realistic homeless guy. Therefore it really does ask the question - Would you actually help this guy? In this movie he seems truly and actually useless. If he was a cliched brooding martial artist, of course you're going to want him. But in reality, you will likely have a poor man who is simply trying to survive/

And this is where the greatness of this movie comes in. As far as a zombie movie goes, this movie takes every advantage of the situation. It explores social classes, discriminations, social Darwinism, ethics and morals. The homeless guy can't be a badass because that would be too cheesy. What are the odds that this homeless guy would be amazing at martial art? If he's just a good-hearted homeless bum looking to survive the apocalypse, would you allow him in your group? The realistic look at class struggle is astounding for a movie that's about Zombies...

There is this once character though that I feel is just a straight-up Jurassic Park villain. He always took me out of the movie when he went too over the top... it's a minor flaw of the movie...

Despite the genre of Zombie movie being a dry well, the movie still employs such a different tone and story that the audience could not tell what was going to happen next. This enhances the tension even more. And with the tension goes the guessing of what will happen. Too many times in Hollywood movies these days (especially in this year's summer blockbusters I might add), I find myself asking the question "When will this and that happen?" I have forgotten that a real question is supposed to be "What will happen?"

Xby TurboMac

Obviously the movie was made on a much lower budget than the usual American blockbusters. A lot of the sceneries and sets do feel flat especially in the beginning. Even towards the end, the lack of decorations and flashiness is obvious. But when you take away this extra stuff, you're still left with probably the most gripping story set in a zombie apocalypse I've seen so far. A drama so genuine and packed it contains stories ranging from that of a girl and her father to class struggle in post industrial society...

This movie surprised the hell out of me. I was expecting a fun time, what I got was definitely much more.