I wouldn’t call myself an expert on zombie movies; honestly, it can’t even be said that I love the genre that much. But as a viewer, what I expect from a zombie movie is a story where a group of zombies attacks aimlessly, while a few uninfected people struggle to survive — and if we’re lucky, at the end of the film they lose (I have this weird side that actually wants the zombies to win in zombie movies). And if you add some emotional side elements like family bonds and sacrifice that I can connect with — like in World War Z — you would make me happy.
However, it seems that Yeon Sang-ho, the director of Train to Busan, who previously told the story of a group of people trapped on a train with zombies, has gotten tired of telling classic zombie stories and is trying to bring some innovation to the genre. He tried to bring this innovation in the same way Marvel Studios did with their “Marvel Zombies” series, starting from the idea of “what if we give zombies superpowers?” Of course, in this movie there are no zombies shooting lasers from their eyes, but by changing the most important feature that makes a zombie a zombie — that is, being “mindless” — he gives them a kind of “collective consciousness” similar to the way ants work…
Here we’re talking about zombies that learn over time, that are physically much more flexible and capable compared to other zombies… Sounds pretty interesting, doesn’t it? Yes, it really does. However, apart from these few small changes he made to the zombie concept, Sang-ho isn’t telling a very different or new story.
The film takes place in an ultra-modern skyscraper in the center of Seoul (the Dongwoo-ri Building). During a big conference of a biotechnology company, a former employee of the company injects himself with the virus, and with the spread of the virus the building is completely quarantined and the people trapped inside lose all contact with the outside.
A small group of uninfected people, including a scientist, tries to survive between the floors of the building. The action scenes are quite dynamic and claustrophobic. Chases through elevator shafts, stairwells, shopping floors, and laboratories… The disgusting and terrifying appearance of the zombies, combined with South Korean cinema’s unique narrative and visual originality, creates a kind of viewing pleasure.
But the story of a group of people running from zombies has been told so many times that the film inevitably seems inspired by many other zombie productions. After a while, this starts to become unbearably boring. The solutions found to control these smart behaviors of the zombies sometimes feel clever and give the feeling of “fresh blood” different from other zombie movies. (Yes, using the “fresh blood” metaphor while talking about a zombie-themed movie felt weird to me too.)
Yet still, the film is crushed under decades of zombie movie storytelling and cannot offer anything truly original of its own. It has a kind of ordinariness where you probably won’t even remember the movie after leaving the cinema, but it’s not a bad film either. You really don’t know what to say. Can you hate a reheated pizza? It still manages to fill your stomach, right? This movie is like that. You can’t really love it too much, nor can you hate it.
