Train to Busan 2016

[8.8/10] The basic moral compass of Train to Busan isn’t hard to uncover. Compassion and altruism are not just valued; they are the measure of worth. Selfishness and indifference are not just bad; they are damning. Seok-woo’s journey in the film brings him from one end of the spectrum to the other, from looking out only for himself in difficult times and neglecting his daughter to constantly put himself at risk to benefit others and ultimately sacrificing himself to save his little girl and a veritable stranger.

The film has scads of fantastic qualities. It’s a truly frightening horror film. It’s a thrilling action film. It is well-acted in moments amusing, tense, or heartbreaking. It’s shot and constructed with an intensity and virtuosity to make the wide variety of moments at play here work. It even finds a way to give shading to a whole troupe of characters in a short amount of time so that their close scrapes and unfortunate demises have meaning and emotional impact.

But the best thing about Train to Busan is how it maximizes that essential feature of the zombie genre -- the ability to turn situation after situation into a moral test. Like the best undead flicks, this is not just a creature feature, content to sic hordes of flesh-eating monsters on likable-enough protagonists and call it a day. Instead, it asks the audience what they would do, what they would sacrifice to save others, what risks they would take because it’s the right thing to do even if it puts oneself in the line of fire, over and over again.

Those ethical thought experiments carry the impressive visual acumen of director Yeon Sang-ho’s approach to zombified terror, and they’re steps along the path toward Seok-woo’s journey from dastard to hero. But they also valorize and damn those who pass or fail them, and exemplify the themes the movie is so interested in, of compassion made manifest, classism abounding, and the lack of absolution that comes from “just following orders.”

All of these ideas are realized in chances to throw your fellow man under the bus (er...train) or instead save him when you could succumb to the zombies yourself in the process. They’re dramatized in the cruel and duplicitous COO of a train company who’s constantly ordering around or even sacrificing those lower in the pecking order than he is. And they come alive when investment fund employees, train assistants, and even soldiers are given orders to do things they know are wrong, but must decide whether to carry out anyway.

That’s the secret weapon of all zombie films -- they are as much about the horror that lies within the hearts of man as they are the chomping ghouls pursuing the living. No sequence in Train to Busan represents that better than the climax of the second act, where a band of plucky survivors have made it through car after car of ravenous zombies and nearly reached the safety of the first class cabin.

On one end, our heroes frantically hold and bash and struggle to keep the zombies from getting into the intermediate care. And on the other, they push and beg and fight to be let into the safety of the car ahead, which has been tied off to prevent them from getting in. The threat is not just the inhuman beings who thoughtlessly nip at your flesh; it’s in the human cruelty and self-centeredness that lets innocent lives perish to save your own skin. Both threats must be overcome, and feed on one another.

There are few more cathartic moments than when an old woman, sitting safely within the front car, witnesses those scrappy survivors banished by her cowardly compatriots, not to mention her selfless sister left to succumb to the dead, and opens the door to the zombies to give her fellow passengers their just deserts. It speaks to the moral opprobrium and throughline that runs through the entire film.

Even if you’re not interested in ethical conundrums made all the more salient through the lens of flesh-eating monsters, Train to Busan works at a pure craft level as a dose of both terror and action. Sang-ho and company know how to construct any number of scares and superlative sequences to keep your blood pumping. Whether it’s a mass of zombified soldiers rushing our heroes, quasi-stealth missions though undead-infested train cars, or daring escapes from tipped over coaches stuffed with zombies only held back by rapidly cracking glass, the film’s creative team keeps the frights coming one after another and with supreme skill.

They also know how to put together scene after scene of jaw-dropping action. There’s a sense in which Train to Busan is akin to something like Night of the Living Dead meets Die Hard. It can boast an undercurrent of social commentary and an estranged husband and father making up for past mistakes in a hairy situation. But it also features a heap of regular joes improvising thrilling solutions to the onslaught of undead. That comes in the form of bruising beat downs of snarling zombies, races against time as the hordes advance, and chained up skirmishes leaving hero and villain alike dangling perilously from a moving vehicle. If you just want average folks doing above average stunts, this is the movie for you.

And yet, what elevates Train to Busan is that it imbues so much character and feeling into those moments, whether bombastic or quiet. There’s not much time to develop anyone here, since most of the survivors fall into recognizable archetypes and there’s a lot of them. But the movie packs in tons of personality to make up for it, focusing on the relationships between the characters, expressed in miniature but recognizable to the audience.

That gives the movie power when Seok-woo slowly but surely puts himself through bigger and bigger risks to protect his daughter and the other innocent people caught in this danger. It gives it meaning when a hard-scrabble, lower class man proves himself more worthy of praise and admiration than the rich bastard throwing all his neighbors to the proverbial wolves. And it gives it emotional force when Seok-woo’s daughter sings the song she’d been practicing for her dad, unwittingly saving her life, feeling seen and responding with admiration for her father for possibly the first time, in a tragic way.

For all its zombie spills and chills, for all of its well-done action, Train to Busan isn’t really about its high octane horror. It’s about the moral choices we make in difficult circumstances, what they say about us and how we see ourselves, and how those crises can uncover the better people we might still become, if only to save those we love.