Train to Busan: Peninsula Review

The latest game news from IGN - one of my fave channels ever - check it out Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula will arrive in U.S. theaters on Friday, August 21. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Four years after Yeon Sang-ho's thrilling, carnage-filled Train to Busan comes a standalone sequel set in the same South Korean zompocalypse universe. With the story also pushed forward four years, Peninsula, which is what the quarantined undead-riddled nation is now referred to as, goes Escape from New York big, ditching much of the close-quarters intimacy and anxiety that Train to Busan served up so well. Bigger doesn't mean better, naturally, nor does it mean weaker. Peninsula works well, and you can't fault someone for wanting to widen the scope of a story and expand the sandbox -- that worked very well for the Purge series -- but the film's journey into hyper-action, and heightened Fast and Furious franchise-style chase sequences, occasionally works against the narrative, distancing us from the zombie horror and emotional stakes. The heart at the center of Peninsula's chaos isn't as stirring or effective as the father/daughter struggle from the previous movie, but Peninsula does have a pulse. Even though the playing field is now the entire ravaged, hollowed-out port city of Incheon, we're still given the smaller, character-focused story of a former Marine Captain, Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won), who's haunted, years later, by those he both failed to save and those he outright ignored during his exodus from South Korea during the zombie outbreak. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/2020/06/16/train-to-busan-presents-peninsula-official-trailer"] Plagued by survivor's guilt, Jung-seok is offered a high-risk job, along with his brother-in-law and two other scavengers, to head back into the Peninsula and recover a lost pile of cash. It's a color-by-numbers redemption story, but Sang-ho spruces it up nicely with a quick one-night jaunt into hell itself. Zombie stories are always about tough choices and the near-impossible challenge of doing the "right" thing. It's why even stories that are a bit derivative, like Peninsula, can still work on very basic, cliché levels. Peninsula doesn't exactly pull an Alien 3 on Su-an and Seong-kyeong from Train to Busan, though a flurry of news reports at the top of the film lets us know how quickly South Korea fell, including Busan, which is mentioned as a place people thought was safe during the first days of the crisis, but ultimately wasn't. There's a decent amount of wiggle room here for the viewer to imagine that those two made it somewhere safe. But all of this wasn't meant to dash our hopes against the rocks as much as it was to blow up, and blow out, the saga so that it transformed into an international affair. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=peninsula-gallery&captions=true"] Setting things years later also, for better or worse, makes the zombies -- which in this world's case are fast-transforming, fast-running, night-blind demons -- into a bit of an afterthought. Like most ghoulish timelines involving zombies, the longer people live in a wasteland, the more adept they become at killing and/or containing the monsters. Then the real threat becomes other people. Those who've lived by their own laws (or lack thereof) to scrape by and survive. Peninsula is no different in that the true surprise when Jung-seok and his crew arrive in Incheon isn't the sinister surplus of zombies, but the actual people who were abandoned in the city and have now formed their own violent, cruel society. Including - yup - a type of zombie Thunderdome game where victims are forced to survive an onslaught of flesh-rippers. However, Jung-seok doesn't only encounter awful crooks and creeps (played by Kim Min-jae and Koo Kyo-hwan). No, his redemptive fate flings him into the orbit of Lee Jung-hyun's Min-jung and her daughters (with the eldest, Lee Re's Joon, being a fantastically great apocalypse driver). Once everyone, good and bad, realizes that the money and Jung-seok's coastal contact could mean rescue, it becomes a balls-to-the-wall blend of a shoot-em-up, a heist, and a Fury Road death race. Those looking for a claustrophobic creepfest like the last film (or the last two films if you count Yeon Sang-ho's animated Seoul Station as the first chapter in this story) may feel let down by Peninsula's outrageous upgrade, but on its own the movie's a fun and raucous ride through a minefield of mayhem.

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