World War Z Meets Snowpiercer In A Non-Stop Thrill Ride

Rating: Null/10 (24 January 2017)

A non-stop locomotive ride that lets the fast-moving & instantly-infected zombies from Brad Pitt- starring World War Z go haywire inside a fast-moving train, this South Korean zombie apocalypse horror is a highly gripping, thoroughly entertaining & consistently engaging journey that moves at breakneck speed from start to finish and keeps ratcheting up the tension throughout its runtime.
The story of Train to Busan finds an absentee father & his young daughter boarding a train from Seoul to Busan to meet her mother. But all hell breaks loose when the train is overrun by zombies and results in death & reanimation of numerous staff members & passengers. With nowhere to run, the two team up with other surviving members to ward off the infected until the train makes it to its destination.
Directed by Yeon Sang-ho, the film borrows certain elements from Marc Forster's World War Z & Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer but carves an original storyline that's brilliantly executed on the film canvas. Sang-ho's kinetic direction keeps escalating the stakes with skilfully crafted moments of horror and slowly but steadily manages to compel the viewers to invest in the characters' journey & eventual fate.
The zombies retain their vicious nature but an added weakness does allow for some suspenseful moments that are expertly carried out. While the movie makes use of CGI in the depiction of the reanimated corpses, the zombies look far more believable than the artificial mess they were in the film they are lifted from, not to mention that even the human characters exhibit an emotional core that was missing in that feature.
The dramatic portions, however, are a tad too overblown as the director is unable to pull them off with same zeal with which he carries out the action-horror segments. The technical aspects are finely executed and the film as a whole really benefits from its energetic camera-work, tight editing, excellent choreography, first-rate production design & fitting score and although a few CGI shots don't look realistic enough, it serves its purpose well.
Coming to the performances, the entire cast chips in with serviceable inputs and even though the characters they play lack an interesting persona & certain amount of depth, the actors somehow succeed in making the audience get on board with their characters' predicament. While everyone does an apt job in their given roles, there really was no need to add a despicable human character when you already have a train full of zombies so that felt a bit forced.
On an overall scale, Train to Busan still makes up for an exciting, action-packed zombie horror and boasts numerous sequences of sustained terror. The build-up is quick and once the train begins to move, it becomes all the more relentless & unstoppable. A few shortcomings like numerous stupid decisions made by a few characters does rob it of its uniqueness but there is no denying that Train to Busan delivers a healthy dose of adrenaline-filled extravaganza until the very end.