My immoderate passion for the East also translates into love for cinema and TV series, called drama, which come from these places.
Today I will tell you about a movie that is not really recent but which I, who love zombie stories, loved very much: Train To Busan.
The movie, wich is a Korean movie produce in the 2016, is directed by Yeon Sang-Ho starring as main protagonist Gong Yoo, known to the Korean drama fans, like meeee, mainly for having recently acted in the Goblin drama, and about a decade ago in the now historic drama Coffe Prince.
The film starts quite slowly with an interminable premise of about 30 minutes in which the main character is introduced: Seok-woo is a divorced stockbroker who lives with his daughter Soo-an in Seoul.
As expected, the father is obviously a workaholic and, as a result, the daughter is growing up as a pain in the ass who always says things like "Daddy, I sang the song at the school play just for you, but you weren't there because you were busy making big money and so I was very upset and now I'll have to go to the psychotherapist for the rest of my life ", etc. etc.
The father would like to tell her that if he does not make the big money she then tears the chestnuts out of him because he cannot buy her the Winx shoes that light up, so he should buy her the cheapest Chinese imitation.
In addition, today is also the birthday of this irritating wad of boredom, but her father obviously gives her a gift that sucks to her, perhaps because it is the same as what he did the year before ... So the brat asks to her father as a real gift to take her to Busan to see her mother whom she has not seen for months since she was probably abandoned by her too so it must be pleasant to be near her.
Considering the lifestyle of Seok-woo, the work he does, the house where he lives, the car he drives and the clothes he wears comes to think that he could take his daughter to Busan even with a private jet.
But Seok-woo who is a duty-conscious person knows that, according to the principles that govern the social life of Koreans, first of all the daughter of the devil must teach positive values such as humility, generosity, submission to superiors, the faculty of apologize even when you know very well that it is not your fault, etc. etc.
To move from Seoul to Busan he decides to use the most miserable means of transport of all the means of transport invented by man and that is the train and not only, to teach a lesson of true humility to his daughter, he decides to take two tickets of third class.
Meanwhile, throughout South Korea we are experiencing strange episodes of unprecedented violence perpetrated by people who manifest psychotic behavior, in short, a sort of popular uprising, but nobody seems to notice or give us too much weight.
Meanwhile on the train to Busan comes a girl who shows quite ambiguous behavior, such as hydrophobia, bleeding lesions all over her body, joint movements typical of people possessed by Satan and things like that.
The girl makes her way through the wagons, nobody seems to notice it obviously, they let her walk quietly between the compartments as if one that moves like Linda Blair is a very normal thing that you see every day but, you know, Koreans are too polite to point out that you're getting the train cars dirty with blood.
Someone, however, begins to notice that something is wrong when the passenger rushes to the state railway official to eat her face.
As you can imagine at this point the passengers, one after the other, are infected with the zombism virus and become living dead whose only purpose is to eat the face of other human beings.
For the remaining hour and a half the film is a continuous succession of scenes in which people still alive try to escape the attack of undead people on a train bound for Busan.
Obviously the protagonists of the film are not only Seok-woo and his adorable little girl, there are also other character, quite stereotyped if I have to be honest, who are trying to save themselves from this zombie apocalypse.
We find for example the couple of young newlyweds whose husband would do anything to save his beautiful pregnant wife, or even two high school students, a baseball player and a cheerleader, something could be born between them if he didn't want to indulge in how much he wants to get a virgin at the wedding or something like that, in the end these two guys have so little screentime that we can't help but make assumptions about their relationship, a pity because I would have liked to see them a little more since together they were really supercute.
Then there are two old ladies that I didn't understand being sisters or who knows what else because one treats the other like a slave.
There is also an honestly somewhat useless bum and a shitty managing director who, look, if I didn't put my hands on his face every time he appeared on the screen it was a miracle.
So what are the positives and the downsides of this movie?
So in the first place the film has a great flaw in my opinion, that is to say the length: two hours are really too many, also because it's okay to show me people trying to escape from a horde of angry zombies once, two is fine, I can also accept the third, but the fourth time that I see the same scene, it becomes a bit boring and redundant.
In short, it could be cut a little and maybe even the final performance of the film would have been less heavy.
Another thing that made me turn up my nose and I don't know if it's a spoiler it's the motivation that was given to justify this epidemic: we all agree that when it comes to an epidemic zombie the cause can only be either a genetic mutation or an experiment ended badly, but to give the news to the protagonist by phone in two seconds I did not like much, at this point not say anything, do not justify and that's it.
But now let's move to the positives things.
So first of all Gong Yoo, then Gong Yoo who could even take off his shirt in some scene but whateva (yes I have a soft spot for Gong Yoo), then the fact that the zombies finally run!
Yeh, you heard right: fast zombies, and not zombies who walk at the same speed as an old man operated on the femur, something that can somehow justify such a rapid expansion of the epidemic.
Of course the Korean zombies are stupid like those Americans, English or any other nationality, after all they don't have brains so we can't be surprised, but these seemed to me like saying ... more beautiful, in the way of moving, of attacking and eating people's faces, in short, I really appreciated these undead.
But I appreciated even more the fact that two seconds after seeing the zombies the protagonists had already figured out how to stop them to ensure an escape route: JUST CLOSE THE DOOR!
Sorry for my enthusiasm but after the ten seasons of The Walking Dead in which people still haven't understood that if you close the door, and not necessarily with a key, the zombies don't have the mental faculty to pull the handle to open it but they will continue to slam against it insistently, this thing that in Train to Busan they understood it kinda after two minutes made me shout to the miracle.
In short I would like to give you a dispassionate advice. When a zombie apocalypse will arrive, because as our secret services claim is not a question of whether it will arrive but when it arrives, remember to close all the doors well.
This was my opinion, more or less, about the film and did you see it?
Write it in the comments!
P.s. 1: sorry for my English, I'm Italian and I put all my effort into writing this post in English. If you notice any errors, please let me know.
P.S. 2: this is an amateur and witty review, it does not want to have the character of a professional review, and absolutely does not want to be offensive to anyone.
Peace and love.