Another zombie movie? That was an understandable reaction to Yeon Sang-ho’s 2016 thriller Train to Busan. But, using familiar elements, the director’s unexpected box office smash struck every stock characterization, emotional beat and action movie mark for just over two hours of perfect pacing. Its cathartic horror revitalized an overplayed subgenre that traffics in fears and metaphors that seem all too obvious, and it particularly resonates in 2020. Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula, a sequel set four years later with a new set of characters, doesn’t transcend the genre like the original. But even though the thrills are less focused and the CGI less convincing, it’s still an entertaining B-picture.
Peninsula opens as soldier Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won) is trying to get his sister and her family away from the emerging zombie crisis that exploded in the first film. Amid the chaos on the evacuation route, Jung-seok drives past a family whose young mother pleads with the soldier to at least get her young daughter to safety, but he leaves them behind. Unfortunately, the ship that was to carry everybody to a safe area—a peninsula in North Korea—itself becomes infected, and Jung-seok and his brother-in-law are among the few survivors.
Before the credits even begin, the setup provides a curious political critique that expands on some of the subtext in the 2016 film. People are told there’s a safe haven in communist North Korea, but that proves not to be the case; meanwhile, Jung-seok and his brother-in-law have taken some shelter in Hong Kong, which remains unaffected by the virus; but there’s a catch. Rogue entrepreneurs have taken to hiring desperate refugees to make the dangerous trip to the peninsula to retrieve an impressive booty: 20 million in US dollars, to be split among four mercenaries.
In the end, neither the state nor the free market is going to come to the rescue. It’s up to the individual, with the requisite amount of soul-searching and character development which, in this case, means a newfound sense of sacrifice. The initial group of four mercenaries don’t all survive the trip, but what happens in the peninsula is even more complicated, as opposing factions who have maintained camp in the doomed region have managed to survive.
If Train to Busan recalled the early seasons of “The Walking Dead” at their best, Peninsula feels like one of the middle seasons when the quality dropped off but before the show became bloated and unwatchable. The scattered set pieces suffer from a lack of focus, in more than one sense. Part of the brilliance of the first installment was that its drama was largely limited to one location; the resulting spectacle amounted to Die Hard on a Train with Zombies. Here, Yeon continues to maximize emotional manipulation, milking themes of survivor’s guilt and the difficulty and anxiety that one feels trying to take care of their family in troubled modern times. Is there any hope? Sure, but only if we take time to look out for each other.
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