5.5 - ZombEaster 2026 pt 3: Train To Busan (2016)

Zombeaster is pulling into the station this week on Speaking Cinema. And what better way to bring it all home than with the best zombie film made this century; Train to Busan. We talk about everything from The Romero Rules of Zombies, South Korea's complicated political history and how the zombie apocalypse can be solved with a bag of weed. We've laughed, we've cried and we relived all that wonderful Covid trauma. So come, share our pain as we bring ZombEaster to a close with Yeon Sang-ho's 2016 genre staple Train to Busan. 

Like the episode? Leave us a comment, or send us an email at SpeakingCinemaPodcast@gmail.com and let us know what you would like to see with this new iteration of Speaking Cinema!

Thank you for listening! 

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

When a zombie virus breaks out in South Korea, passengers fight to survive on a bullet train from Seoul to Butan. This week, we discuss a budding genre staple, a country's struggles with its recent past, and one of the most important cinematic movements of the 21st century. We're pulling the train into the station and ending Zombiester with a bang. This is Jon Sang Ho's 2016 Zombie Masterpiece, Train to Bootsan. Welcome back to another episode of Speaking Cinema, a podcast where two friends are routinely subjected to the increasingly unhinged openers from their other friend. I'm John Beuly, and as always, I'm joined by my friends and torture victims, Anthony Zaccone and Adam Saccafico. Gentlemen, how are we doing today?

SPEAKER_05 1:03

I'm happy I saw this movie, but boy, I can tell you this right now, because usually what we do is we'll do two watches. One watch is just the movie straight through, and the second half is just to like, you know, figure out our takes and our scenes and whatnot. And John, I'll say this outright. I can't watch this movie two days in a row. I got halfway through today, and I'm just like, you know what? I watched it yesterday. It's pretty fresh in my head. I'm I'm good.

SPEAKER_01 1:25

Without jumping too deep in the show off the rip, like, what was it about it that made it hard to get through that second time?

SPEAKER_05 1:32

It's a very harrowing film in a lot of respects. It's fun in a zombie movie sort of a way, but it's like I'm sitting there going, like, do I want to watch people be shitty to each other during a zombie apocalypse for a second straight day and have it end the way it ends? I'm just like, you know what? I I got the first time. I'll probably revisit this film in about six months' time. But two days in a row was a bit of an ask.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Yeah, I mean, I think it has been eight years since I saw it. And I texted you guys like when I was in the first like 10 minutes of it, like I'm having a really hard time. And it's not because the movie's bad by any means, but because like I was watching all the character intros and I am just thinking, like, oh god, I love them all. Yeah. And and I know it ain't gonna go well for most of them.

SPEAKER_05 2:23

And that's the the beauty of this film, and not to jump in a little bit too much, but you never know who is gonna get it, which is something that is paramount in a film like this, where it feels like everybody's introduced perfectly, and you get a sense of who everybody is, and then next thing it's like the the woman stewardess, for example, on the train, has a good few minutes introduction, and you're like, Oh, she's gonna be there for like she's gonna be one of the main characters. She's dead, like two minutes.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

She's gone immediately. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They give you just enough time to like find something you love about her, and then and then she's fucking dead. She's like the second zombie. But John, why did you pick for Zombiester part three, 2026? Why did you pick Train to Busan?

SPEAKER_03 3:10

I picked it for at least two different reasons. Uh, the first reason being through the Zombiester programming lens, we did the classic that kickstarted everything. We did the satirical reinterpretation of Sean of the Dead, and I felt for this block it would be really good to do a take on it that wasn't connected to the West. Because even though Sean of the Dead is an English film, you still have like a fair accessibility to the genre and as an audience member to English actors, and I thought this would be a really good way to program a film from a country that's very different from the United States and from England and see how they would take on that type of genre. And the answer is they're just as critical of capitalism as uh Dawn of the Dead probably is. The other reason being, um, for me, this is one of the best films in the genre. You know, you you've got all of the classics, and I also really love Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead. But the first time I saw this, just I really do think that this is one of the best films in the entire genre.

SPEAKER_01 4:19

I agree with that. I mean, I think that the movie came out in what is it, 2016? And by 2016, we are neck deep in a zombie craze throughout American entertainment. Um, television shows, movies, like there's tons of zombie media going on after Sean of the Dead. That after a point, it can really get fatiguing. It's like, really, how much can you do in this, you know, before it starts to get repetitive? How many seasons of uh The Walking Dead can you have where there's like a villain each season who's like the worst guy you've ever seen, and then next season they have to come up with a guy who's just like a little bit worse than that? And like it just was starting to get overwhelming. And I want to say I saw it in 2018. So, like, yeah, I mean, this is sort of going right into my first time there. Every once in a while, you get a movie in a genre that's just like a breath of fresh air, and that's what I felt with Train de Busan. Like, even though it's an emotionally very heavy movie, it was an entry into a genre that I love that was unlike anything I'd seen before, told an incredible story, and it presented it in a way where like the resolutions to the conflict just aren't the same because it's part of a culture I was less familiar with. With like this zombiester setup we've got. At first I thought about it like it was original satire and then international, sort of forgetting that Sean of the Dead is also an international film from where we are in the USA. Maybe because, you know, at one point we were a colony, like we still feel a bit of a connection there. But like you said, like we are getting a very good, unique lens here where we have like an American film, a British film, and a Korean film, and we get to see like how would these groups of people handle this? You know, how is the situation different across, you know, the globe? So, yeah, let's get into the first times. I'm gonna just keep going because I was sort of saying it already. But my first time was in 2018. My friend Taylor Schultz showed it to me. I watched it at his house in Brooklyn, and like I said, breath of fresh air, I was immediately taken by it. It was something that made me think for a long time. I sort of wanted to save this for the scenic view, and like we should talk about it more, but like the thing that got to me about it that really stuck in my head was that there's not a single gun in the entire movie, right? Like, that was just I think one of those little details, and I do want to I'm just gonna move past it because I want to talk about it in the scenic view, but it is one of those things of like it just made me realize, like, oh, you can totally do zombies a completely different way than what we've been inundated with. It rekindled my love for it a little bit, and uh yeah. What about uh what about you, John? What was your first time?

SPEAKER_03 7:18

Yeah, so my first time, what I find really funny is I think my first time was in 2018. I actually can't recall exactly when my first time was, but I would venture it was probably 2018 because I do remember hanging out with friend of the pod Mike Chiquetti in 2018 and basically forcing him to watch this movie. So I I would venture that's the first time I saw it. Because it couldn't have been 2016, because that's when it was in theaters in South Korea. So I yeah, I I would say it's around then, but it was right in the middle of I would say chapter two of my peak into like just voracious consumption of Korean media because I I remember it was right around that time, between 2016 and 2018, where I saw a bunch of Korean films like back to back to back to back. And Train to Busan was just like just on that list because I was literally at a point where I was like, oh, it's a Korean movie? All right, this is gonna be great. I'm gonna watch this. Do you remember your first impressions of it at all? Yeah, I loved it. I remember thinking to myself that it was absolutely brilliant because the the immediate parallel I took was, oh, I saw the pitch meeting here. They probably just walked in and said, Oh yeah, you know Dawn of the Dead, the 2004 version, where the zombies are sprinting inside of a mall. Do that on a bullet train. You hear that in the background? That's the sound of the machine printing money. And then subsequently it did. This was the 14th movie in South Korea to pass the 10 million ticket marker. And at one point it was in the top 10 highest-grossing films in South Korea, and since then it's now number 19.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

Alright, so Adam, this was your first time seeing Train to Pusan. Want to give us just a little bit about your first impression here?

SPEAKER_05 9:09

I had this thought while watching Train to Pusan for the first time, and similar to the first Park Chan Wuk film I saw in theaters, which was Decision to Leave, I'm sitting there going, the South Koreans are so smart, they've somehow found a way to make Western movies better than Americans can. Because, and while I do think that we're starting to kind of come out of the darkness a little bit, and I do think that we're hitting a point in American cinema at least that feels a little bit more refreshed after a decade plus of kind of IP hell for lack of a better term. In the interim, though, there was and that always feels that way with international movements. If you think about it, when Hollywood was in a downturn in the 50s and the early 60s, the French New Wave was there to kind of fill that void. In the 80s, while horror films were doing great and genre films were doing great here, you really felt like the Hong Kong action cinema movement really took hold and kind of captured the imagination of Western audiences. And I think in the interim now, we've had the Korean New Wave kind of fill this kind of empty void of Hollywood films that have been coming out. And Train the Passan kind of fits that category for me of this feels like a movie. This feels like a a genuine zombie movie that I had not seen in a minute, maybe not since Sean or you know the Dawn of the Dead remake at least. I mean, you can argue the 28 Days films, but those are both English, as well as Sean.

SPEAKER_01 10:30

I mean, this has come up a few times in our thing. Are those zombie movies?

SPEAKER_05 10:34

I'll say yes because that's how they're classified, just for the sake of argument. But by that same token though, this movie felt like the best zombie movie I'd seen in a minute. I I'm not gonna call it the best I've ever seen, because I do think that Dawn of the Dead, the Romero version, is still top of that list. But this actually helped that in the sense that it felt like a movie. Whereas a lot of zombie films I've seen over the last decade don't feel like movies per se. I hated to be the Scorsese guy, but like, you know, it doesn't feel like cinema. This does.

SPEAKER_01 11:07

Yeah. It's not shot in that like super clean manner that I think we're used to in the streaming era. Like, this has, in my opinion, particularly good cinematography for a zombie movie, and like some of the camera tricks and setups that they do are like really incredible for building like the dread and like feeling the violent energy of the zombies. And I think that that highly cinematic approach to a genre horror film is part of what like makes this stand out so much in the genre. I want to say that IMDB lists this in the top 10 of best zombie films ever made.

SPEAKER_05 11:51

And deservedly so.

SPEAKER_03 11:53

Yeah, there's so much going on in this film, and the thing that I have found really interesting as one of my best friends from Back Home, who I got turned on to K-dramas, and subsequently, like a lot of Korean media as well. One of the conversations that we talked about as to like why we both like K-dramas in particular so much as a form of entertainment, but I think also with a lot of Korean films as well, there's a lot of empathy in the filmmaking. And there's a lot of empathy in the storytelling. And I have often found that one of the reasons I go back to a lot of Korean visual media right now is because that empathy is just so present in these types of films. And again, a film like Train de Busan, this is still, at the end of the day, a film designed to be entertaining. This is a blockbuster. You know, I'd argue that the films of Park Chan Wu fall into that sort of blockbuster territory. I mean, they're not big, colossal, massive films, but Park Chan Wuk is a prestige filmmaker, Bong Jun-ho is a prestige filmmaker. But they have this level of empathy in their filmmaking that I feel like is sometimes devoid in a lot of studio films here in America right now.

SPEAKER_01 13:07

Yeah, I agree. And I think, you know, empathy, like, in in a way, like that's what this, that's what this movie is about. Oh yeah. Uh like they, when you talk about empathy, like raises to me like the character dynamics in this and what we said before. Like, in the first few minutes, you meet all these characters and you learn something to love about all of them, even if you only have them for a couple moments, or even if they're in the film the entire time. And God help you if they're in the film for a long time, because you just learn to keep loving them. Yeah. And spoilers, we always advise you should watch the movie. No buddy. If you if you fall in love with these characters, you're gonna have a bad time. I mean, you're gonna have a great time, but you know, it's not gonna feel great.

SPEAKER_05 13:57

And the the irony there, it could have ended so much worse than it did. Yeah, yeah. And we'll get into that.

SPEAKER_01 14:05

Yeah, you also have like all the good stuff that you know a zombie movie has, which is like interpersonal struggle, but then also like, you know, coming to an understanding over differences and you know, things that really make you feel real feels, which is another thing that I think just makes this film so good. You know, we talked about how like we cried a little bit at the end of Sean of the Dead. This, like, oh my god, I fucking ugly cry at the end of this movie.

SPEAKER_05 14:33

I audibly yelled a couple times at the screen during the last sequence. During dude, no, the last sequence, uh I and again, not to jump ahead, but like when they're walking through the tunnel and you're thinking, Oh, they're gonna do the Night of the Living Dead thing, I literally went, Oh fuck you.

SPEAKER_01 14:50

Yeah, right. And and oh man, the tension there. But let's not get to the end of the show. We're at the beginning of the show. So let's get into our overall takes. In the shortest description you can give us, what do you think this film is trying to tell us as the audience? John, why don't you go first? See your pick.

SPEAKER_03 15:10

This is probably a consistent through line with a number of Korean films that we'll talk about that I'll be picking between like 2000 to now. This film is a scathing critique on capitalism and how it destroys the environment, people, families, and you know, just corrupts the human spirit as well.

SPEAKER_01 15:34

That is one way of looking at it. It's definitely a main plot point of the film of, you know, like the ramifications of capitalism. But as for like the inherent meaning of it, like that is a that's a way of looking at it that I'm gonna be interested in hearing you unpack when we get to the scenic view. Adam, what about you? What do you think? In the simplest way you can, what do you think this movie's about?

SPEAKER_05 15:58

In the shortest way I can, well, I do see John's I not even see, I know for a fact that this movie has a very anti-capitalist slant. But I also think that this is a movie with a very anti-fascist slant. Because I know that South Korea does have a history of fascist rule. You know, John, you'd be more well versed in the history of, you know, Korea than I am, specifically the Fifth Republic and how bad it got in South Korea during the 80s.

SPEAKER_03 16:24

Just as a brief interjection with the history of that, it's interesting because you're absolutely right. The 80s was brutal under President Chundu Huan, which resulted in the Guangzhou Massacre. But Pak Chang-hee, who was the president from 61 to 1979, I believe, he's like basically the godfather of contemporary Korea. Like he was a brutal dictator, but he also created most of the economic reforms that resulted in contemporary Korea today. So it's it's interesting how like capitalism and fascism go hand in hand, but one of the after effects of a brutal dictator was pulling them out of being one of the poorest countries in the world and making them the 14th largest economy.

SPEAKER_05 17:06

And to my point, though, about this film, I believe that this is a film, after some contemplation, that's ultimately about a fear of going back to dictatorship. And a fear of going back to kind of being mindless and almost like in a zombie-like state. And what brought me to that conclusion was a scene very early on when the media reports are starting to come in and everybody on the train is getting a sense that there's something wrong. And the two old ladies that we follow, one of them is complaining, like, oh, there are riots. You know, back in the good old days, there weren't riots, you just go bet get re-educated. And again, it's a film in dialogue with the past of Korea because somebody characters are acting a little more selfishly. Not just that, but the climate in which the film came into. 2016, it wasn't just America folks, it was kind of a worldwide epidemic of more totalitarianistic thinking. And I do believe the filmmakers had that very much in their mind when making this film. So my take ultimately is that it's a fear of going back to a time where you were essentially zombies.

SPEAKER_03 18:11

The irony was that when this film came out, the at that time president of South Korea, her name was Park Gyeunhee, and she was the daughter of Park Cheng-hee, the dictator from 61 to 79. And after she got ousted, Moon Jaein was, from my understanding, a pretty solid democratic president. But then the next guy who got elected, Yun Sukiol, that dude was a nutcase. That's the guy who tried to do martial law across the entire country in 2024. Hearing what you're saying now, that actually makes a lot of sense given who got elected after Moon Jaein.

SPEAKER_01 18:46

I actually have two takes, so I couldn't really decide which one. Because I have one that sort of leapfrogs off of our last two entries, and then I have one that's more specific to just this film. So I'm just gonna do both. The one that piggybacks off of Knight of the Living Dead and Sean of the Dead is you can't outrun disaster, but you can decide what kind of person you are when it catches you. Like Knight of the Living Dead, like we talked about how you know breakdowns in communication or society, you know, if we can't work together, that'll be our downfall. Shawn of the Dead, it's like if you can't just take care of yourself, how can you take care of anyone else? You gotta like grow up and you know learn to actually take action to, you know, make it through any of you know life's hardships. And then train to Busan. So this is my second take, the one that's actually more specific to this. When people work together through crisis, they endure. When we only look out for ourselves, people die. It's very similar to Knight of the Living Dead in that only when we can make a team and build a plan together and like actually cooperate, every scene in Train to Business where they work together is successful. And how many characters are undone just by somebody only looking out for themselves? You know, and I think like seeing this in 2018, we talk about the first time we watched the movie. You want to know the second time I watched the movie? Yeah, it was the Lord's year 2020, right around April. You wanna know who I watched it with? Same guy, Taylor Schultz. We were fucking quarantined in the COVID-19 pandemic, and we're like, you know what this sort of reminds me of? Train to Busan. Yeah. Alright, what about the title here? So let's let's break down the title. Train to Busan. Sure is. What do you guys want to pull from this one? Do you guys actually have a title take on it?

SPEAKER_05 20:53

I tried. I tried very hard because we tend to have direct titles. So I'm like, but what if like Busan in Korean means something other than Busan? So I did a quick Google translate. Nope, did not turn out to be the case.

SPEAKER_03 21:07

It's a Korean title, it's even more literal.

SPEAKER_01 21:11

Yeah, going to Busan. Like it's uh me and Busan. Busan Hang? Yeah, it's like Busan Hang. Yeah, it literally means to Busan or going to Busan. So it even gets just a little bit more simple. I got nothing on this one.

SPEAKER_03 21:28

Yeah, I got I got nothing. But you know what? It's iconic as hell.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

It is, I it's iconic, yeah. Alright, let's get into the opening images here. So, John, lead us through the first few minutes of train to Busan.

SPEAKER_03 21:43

We open on a mannequin as the camera pulls out to reveal a quarantine slow zone. A truck pulls in and is sprayed down and decontaminated, and then waved through. The driver rolls down the window. What's going on? Burying those hogs again? He asks. The worker replies, it's not foot and mouth disease. There was a minor leak at the biotech district. It's nothing. You said that before, the driver replies. If you need to bury my livestock again, I'll really go mad. And he's waved on through by the worker. The driver gripes about the quarantine and them being liars. He reaches for his phone and takes his eyes off the road for a moment and hits something. He gets out of the car and he sees that he hit a deer. He gets back in the car and drives off, but the camera pans to its corpse as it reanimates, stands up, and looks around. Its eyes are glassy and grey. The score swells and the title card appears. Trained a busan.

SPEAKER_05 22:34

Obviously, the prologue does what a good prologue does, which is it foreshadows the entire film. You think about the truck driver and his frustrations. He's thinking about himself and his livestock and what this is gonna do to him. As opposed to, wait, there is a leak at a biotech thing? That sounds horrible. Everybody early on is thinking about themselves. When the guy hits the deer, he's not thinking, oh my god, hit here. It's like, oh man, this fucking day can't get any shittier. You know, why the guard like again, he's thinking about himself.

SPEAKER_01 23:02

The prologue is interesting to me because it's like it's immediate setup, right? Like you said, you know, it shows like a selfish character. You could make a connection to that and like, you know, themes throughout the rest of the movie. There's a line in it that I find interesting. Are you burying those hogs again? And the fact that he asks, are you burying them again? That it's a zombie movie, there's a non-zero chance that they're burying the same hogs a second time. And the deer getting hit with the car. First of all, it breaks a general rule of like the Romero zombie, which is that animals other than humans can't reanimate. I will say that Trained Busan from here on goes to break a number of Romero rules, and it rips so fucking good that I uh I don't care. But also, you know, like a a general trope of like the modern horror movie is to start with a kill to sort of remind people what kind of movie they're in for, right? Or you start with some type of like moment of horror or terror and then you know start the rest of the story. Like, let's say midsummer, you know, that starts with the you know the gassing of the the girl's parents, right? And then it goes into the rest of the movie. Like I think this is a very nice little subtle way of doing that.

SPEAKER_05 24:27

It's less that the film starts with a death, like you know, most of these films usually do. It starts with the resurrection. You literally see the deer come back to life.

SPEAKER_00 24:38

The deer is risen.

SPEAKER_05 24:43

Of course.

SPEAKER_02 24:47

We got everything in this block. Even J-Man makes an appearance.

SPEAKER_05 24:53

So what you think that's what the deer is a metaphor for?

SPEAKER_01 24:56

No, I was just saying it's just a Jesus Christ. He died and came back for your scene.

SPEAKER_05 25:02

I always felt like if you're gonna do a prologue, a good prologue should be the film itself in a microcosm. You know, it should almost stand as a short and of itself. And while, again, narratively not as much, but it definitely sets up everything with the film. And also I feel like, to my point about you know, South Korean films feeling more like films right now than most American films, the image of the deer resurrecting and then just looking to the camera with the the wired-out eyes, it's a striking visual. And it gets you hooked where it's like, one, alright, I don't think I've seen this before. Two, shit just got real, and three, what am I in for?

SPEAKER_01 25:38

Yeah. It's like body contortion. The way that the deer like comes back to life is so unnerving. It does set the tone for like how many more times you're gonna see that. One question I had if when a deer comes back as a zombie, does it crave flesh or does it still want like twigs and berries and shit? But it wants them like way worse than before. Does it only eat other deer?

SPEAKER_05 26:00

Exactly. I was gonna say that. Is it a situation where it craves flesh but not human flesh? All the animals that become zombies just hunt within their own ecosystems.

SPEAKER_01 26:08

Speaking of cinemapod at gmail.com or leave us a comment if you uh have any idea what a zombie deer hungers for, we wanna know, and we we might bring it up in another I don't know, another show sometime. What about Sokwoo? Like, what do we think about his first scene in Drezin?

SPEAKER_03 26:27

It's interesting to me, like Adam said, and I would agree with him, that it during this period South Korea is just running circles around us in terms of filmmaking, and I think that this is just such a strong introduction for this character, and it reminds me a lot of like the spec days of screenwriting, where you have just such a clear, distinct image of what this character is. Like, we know from the jump that this guy is he's selfish because of his job, he's very amoral, he clearly doesn't care about the disaster outside of the context of how will it affect his fund. And he's also an absent father, while simultaneously wanting to keep his daughter because it holds power over his wife, or ex-wife rather. And it's just such a stark contrast to where we eventually see him land by the end of the film and the journey that he goes on. This reminds me a lot of spec storytelling that we would see in like the late 80s and early 90s.

SPEAKER_01 27:27

I think like to, you know, the take that you had, it it sets up what his arc in terms of like the anti-capitalist message is gonna be. Spoiler, you know, a little bit, but like later in the film we do sort of learn that the outbreak started at one of the companies that he funds, right? So, like watching that first scene, like in hindsight of that, you see like his first instinct is to sell all related funds. It's like this is looking like it's popping out of one of your shops, dude. And like the entire country's overrun with zombies, and you're trying to just like put distance between yourself and that. Like, this would be a time to maybe take ownership and you know, responsibility for the mess you have made. And to be fair, like at that point he doesn't really understand like what's about to happen, but still, you know, in hindsight, we see that like his very first act is a highly selfish one.

SPEAKER_05 28:27

I hate doing this because I feel like film discourse is so negative right now, and I'm trying to be as positive as I can, not compare like, well, we make bad movies and they make good. Like, I don't want to be that guy. But I will say this, and this is something I've been missing in American films lately: the character feels like an adult. There is no like arrested emotional development, there is no superhero bombass behind him. He's a flawed guy who clearly has a lot of lessons he needs to learn, but at the end of the day, he's an adult guy dealing with adult problems. You know, and that's something that I did find refreshing. And look, we've all seen movies about the absentee father who has to learn a lesson about what it means to be a parent. And look, we're gonna get that and then some in this film. But I'll say this about the intro, like that's something I felt good for me, where I'm like, oh shit, I remember stuff like this. It's been a while since I've seen films like this. Like I said, recently I think it's starting to kind of come back a bit more, but that's something I found refreshing was well, here's a guy who's kind of a shitty stockbroker. Oh, he's kind of a shitty parent, but he feels real.

SPEAKER_03 29:34

He is a real, shitty person.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

Yeah. Proper noun, capital letters, he is a regular guy. Like, he's just a dude who works a job. He's probably like middle management somewhere at this fund management company that he works for. Like, we have no reason to believe that he's like at the top of the company, but you know, we also know that he has people working for him and connections and stuff.

SPEAKER_03 29:59

He clearly makes some pretty solid money, from what you can tell, based on like buying his daughter a Nintendo Wii for the second time at like in a moment's notice. He drives a nice car, he lives in a nice building.

SPEAKER_01 30:12

That you forgot that you bought a Wii. Like, we we dream of having that kind of money where you can forget that kind of purchase.

SPEAKER_03 30:20

Yeah, and then to book two tickets on a bullet train for the following day.

SPEAKER_01 30:26

So when we see him interact with his daughter for the first time, what do we make of this interaction?

SPEAKER_05 30:32

That he doesn't know what he's doing? I think about this stuff a lot. I think people tend to have kids just because it's a thing to do, but yet not everybody is built for it. Now, do I think that you know Sakwoo is actually he's capable of being a good father? I think he is. I think once they get on the train and shit starts hitting the fan, he's very attentive and he's trying to get his kid out of there before anything else. And as selfish as a person as he is, he still does care about his child. I just don't think he knows how to be a parent yet. Not to jump forward, but there's a moment in the film that explains how much being a parent means to him. So do I think that it's a situation where maybe he shouldn't have kid kids? Possibly, I think maybe he had kids too soon, and he's still trying to learn as shit kind of progresses.

SPEAKER_01 31:16

I'm gonna, you know, disagree with that. Like, I I didn't take that at all. Because like if you think about a regular guy, what does a regular guy do? He ha he gets a job, he gets a wife, they have a kid, they have a house, they get divorced, they do regular people things. Yeah, and yeah, and statistically, lately they do get a divorce. So it's like I don't think that it's that he shouldn't have like had kids, but like having a kid and not having the wife around definitely wasn't the plan. He just got so focused with being the breadwinner that he completely shifted his priorities towards that and away from his daughter.

SPEAKER_03 31:57

It's almost like working a job that's designed to make more money for a handful of people at the top forces you to prioritize making money over your family.

SPEAKER_01 32:10

Oh yeah, no, he works an evil job for evil people, I'm sure. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 32:16

But here's also my question, too. If he's so preoccupied with the job, and I I believe this was alluded to that he just kind of wants to have power over his ex, but why does he even want to have you know custody over the child?

SPEAKER_03 32:27

I think it's a power thing.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

I think it's a selfishness thing.

SPEAKER_05 32:31

Yeah. It's like this is a my kid kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 32:34

I mean, I think that he wants the kid around him, even though objectively, if he were to look at his life, he would see that his situation is not the best of the two situations for the kid. Like, we don't really know the mom's situation, but we know that the kid seems to prefer it, right? Would his daughter be happier with mom, but he keeps the kid because it's my kid, he wants the kid, even though he's only thinking of himself and his want to have his kid, then to like do what is best for his kid. That's another way of just looking at it from the selfishness angle, because I didn't really get a note. You guys can explain it. I want to hear your take on it. What it was that made you think that it was about having power over his ex.

SPEAKER_03 33:26

I think for me, having power over his ex it's kind of a traditionally masculine trait. I think the other thing too is this is information that I'm extrapolating based on unsaid things, but backstory that I'm aware of. Like Adam had mentioned previously about South Korea having a history of being a dictatorship. Knowing what I know about South Korea historically and the way that it has gone from an agricultural society to the 14th largest economy in the world, you could extrapolate based on what little information we've given, if you know the backstory. So Kwuk, his parents probably had very standard jobs. They probably struggled. And he worked his ass off, probably was in high school in the 90s, when everything was really transitioning, but then the IMF crisis hits. So his parents probably had like just standard, very middle, lower middle class jobs, probably struggled financially. He gets this really good job that he worked his ass off for, and he's making some pretty good money. He knows he can provide his daughter an even better future financially than he had for himself. Like, if we're gonna take the route of there is a good father in there as we see as the film progresses, but he's just a very absent father because of all the work he's doing, that could be one interpretation of why he wants to keep his daughter because there would be more opportunities for colleges and high school in Seoul. There's more economic opportunity in Seoul. There is in Busan as well, but when you compare Busan and Seoul, it's like comparing, it would be like Miami versus New York. There's a lot of opportunity in both cities, but objectively you're gonna have more opportunities in New York than you would in Miami. Maybe that's me trying to say, on the surface level, selfishness desire, but maybe through empathy and understanding of historical context, that selfishness has something deeper built in. But we don't talk about that in the film either.

SPEAKER_01 35:22

Since we're already doing it, let's jump into the scenic view. So at this point, we like to bop around the movie, pick out scenes that stood out to us that back up our thesis about what we think the film is about, or just scenes we really like. We don't have to go in order, we just go wherever the wind takes us. So who wants to go first? Who's got a good scene that they want to unpack?

SPEAKER_03 35:41

As I sometimes do with scenic view, sometimes I think that a character or like a through line makes more sense for me to cover. Because the scenes in this film, they rip through this film. I was watching it and thinking, like, oh, we we go like pretty scene to scene here.

SPEAKER_01 35:58

It's the fastest two hours I've seen in a minute.

SPEAKER_03 36:02

This movie, this movie sprints, and I think for me that's why, in conjunction with my take, I want to focus on the CEO character. The CEO of the Railway. Because I think for me, he's he's like the core critique that this film is going for. He is, in a way, a mirror to Sok Wu and what Sog Wu could become. And by introducing this character who is just a colossal piece of shit, it gives Sog Wu the room to grow because now he is diametrically opposed to what this guy is. But this guy, I mean, he throws his weight around. You know, the one of the first scenes we get with him is when the I think he's a homeless guy, when he runs onto the train and he's in the bathroom, and Suean is waiting for the bathroom, and the CEO says to Suwan something like, if you don't go to school or if you don't do well in life, you'll end up just like him. And it's just like, so from the jump, this guy is just like he looks down on everybody.

SPEAKER_01 37:02

And Suan, who who's like the moral innocence of the movie, and she says back to him, My mom says the people who say that are bad people. And so, like, just from his intro, like, yeah, this guy fucking sucks. And Sue Wan, the you know, like sort of always right character in the film, is like just laying that out there for you. But yeah, keep going, Jen.

SPEAKER_03 37:26

Yeah, and so that like this guy ends up in his own way, pretty much getting everybody he comes in contact with killed. This dude sucks. He inadvertently gets everybody killed. And the most notable scene to me is when after Sokwoo and Song Hua and the rest of the gang, when they fight their way through to the train, get to the first class car, and the CEO just like loses his shit when they like almost like break down the doors, and he's like, They're all infected! And then forces them off to the vestibule, and he gets all of them killed because one of the older sisters.

SPEAKER_01 38:07

Yeah, it turns out the vestibule was the place to be.

SPEAKER_03 38:10

Yeah, the vestibule was the place to be because one of the older sisters dies because, you know, she just couldn't make it in time and chooses to sacrifice herself. The other sister opens up the door and gets them all killed, and she's very much just a middle class person. And it's like, what happens when middle class people are tired of the upper class just shitting on them and spitting on them and treating them horribly? So there's that scene. There's also once they get past the train and it derails and they have to get to the next train, this CEO he gets the baseball player's girlfriend killed. He also gets the train conductor killed too. Like the train conductor goes out of his way to get a new train.

SPEAKER_01 38:53

He is the one who bites Sokwoo. He like he yeah, I want to piggyback you off of this because I think that yes, this supports your thesis and your overall take. It also supports mine if you compare it to a second character. Sokwoo is this person that has like the ability to be a good man, he just currently isn't. And he comes across two characters that have like an influence over him, and one is Jon Suk, the CEO character, and the other one is Sung Wa, the very caring father to Sleepy and his uh pregnant wife, Song Kyung. We have uh Yon Suk, who when Sok Wu is first running from the zombie invasion, Yang Sook is like, close the door, close the door, and he closes the door on Sung Hua and Song Kyung, and he closes them out, and you know, eventually they get through and they have that interaction between Song Wu and Sok Wu of don't you think you owe me an apology? So Sok Wu as our perspective of the film, even though the film does go out of his perspective a number of times, he has like the angel and the demon on his shoulder in those two characters, where we think of characters in a horror movie usually in some sort of trope, as like each of them represent like a certain human element that the story needs in order for it to illustrate its central dramatic argument. And um, that is what I see as like there's the altruistic Songwa who is willing to help anyone. He is an immensely powerful person. Like, one of his main character traits is big strong loves his wife. He's like, he's just fucking flinging zombies across the train with his bare hands at one point in this movie, but he's a good man, damn it. And then there's Jansuk who just makes every decision for himself and gets everybody killed in the process. And so Selkwoo has those two characters to look at of like, who do I want to be?

SPEAKER_03 41:07

Yeah. Do I want to be the shitty CEO? Or do I want to be the guy who can literally punch zombies in the mouth? Yeah.

unknown 41:16

Like.

SPEAKER_01 41:17

I love Songhua. I love his character so much. He's great, dude. Yeah, he's just like, he's pure good energy, and he's just like, like gorilla strong. He's such a great character.

SPEAKER_03 41:34

And I think what's what's really funny too, as a brief aside, is that for a zombie movie that has no firearms in it, you kind of wonder when they were writing, if they were like, well, we can't put firearms in the movie, but what if we cast a guy who has literal guns for arms?

SPEAKER_01 41:51

Yeah, but Sunma's still bringing bringing the gun show.

SPEAKER_03 41:55

Like there's there's no there's no firearms, but that actor's got a set of guns on him.

SPEAKER_01 42:00

Yeah. Which is another thing about like just the character dynamics of this film is that it's like I love a movie like let's say The Warriors, where there's just like a bunch of like themed gangs and shit. Like, I love when like a film has you know a bunch of different like little pools of characters and you know they each have their own stories and eventually, you know, come together. And this movie has that over and over with each car on the train has its own story at first, and like the the the baseball team, they all had speaking lines. Those people got paid real money to be ripped apart by zombies in the first act.

SPEAKER_03 42:42

Well, in a brief little like fun fact, too. One of the baseball players, like the main baseball player who gets through most of the movie, that actor's Chewoo Sheik. That actor ended up being the like the lead in parasite. Like, that's a really famous actor now.

SPEAKER_05 42:57

But even like Young Sook, like going back to the scene where he gets everybody killed in the one car, he had the one attendant who was on his side and it was kind of like his sycophantic like follower. He literally throws that guy to the fucking zombies. He's like literally like they're hiding in the bathroom and they peek their head out and he goes, Look over there! He like shoves him in and then takes off. Like the guy is such a twat. And look, I'll say this, and again, we keep jumping back and forth. I feel like they tried to give that character an out, because after that guy gets bit ultimately, and he's kind of in that in-between phase, they give him this whole little solo about like how I'm just trying to get to my s my mother. If I just get to my mother, and I'm sitting there going, No, motherfucker, you do not give this character an out. I want to see him get his fucking intestines ripped out.

SPEAKER_03 43:42

You know, I think is part of what I was talking about earlier with the aspect of empathy in regards to filmmaking and screenwriting, because we're not empathetic towards this guy. But nonetheless, they don't portray him as a mustache twirling caricature of like South Korea's. Equivalent of the Rockefellers. This guy, when he is dying, is thinking about trying to go see his mom, and we're like, you're still a horrible person, but horrible people are human beings.

SPEAKER_01 44:11

Yeah, now that I think about it, I'm not actually even really sure that he was like we called him the CEO of the train line. I'm actually not sure that he did work for the train line.

SPEAKER_03 44:22

No, I no, he's not the CEO, I think, for like that particular train line, but he's the CEO of a rail corporation.

SPEAKER_05 44:28

Alright, let's take into account that maybe this dude's trying to get to a sick mom. Is he the kind of guy that like he already seems a bit high class? He already is kind of throwing his weight around. But like, the problem is though, like again, you're reading between the lines, a guy that cannot be trusted because he literally gets everybody killed. Do you think he's even lying about his CEO for that matter? Because it'll get him a little bit further ahead. He doesn't have a business card on him. He literally frantically looks for one, like, oh, do I have a card on me? No, you're just taking me at my word. I'm the CEO of this company, and they they shut down all the busing lines and stuff, and we'll be quarantined. We have to get to Busan no matter what.

SPEAKER_03 45:06

Like I was trying to say too, is it's like I don't have empathy for this character, but I appreciate that when he's on death's door, you know, we realize, like, oh, you're a human piece of shit. Like, you're not just evil for the sake of being evil. It's like when it comes to classifying like villains in screenwriting, like the thing I always tell people is like, even Hitler loved his dog.

SPEAKER_01 45:27

That is, you know, something about this movie that you don't get too many of those like really crazy scenes that you might see of like a person being ripped apart like in other zombie movies. Because these zombies, like, from bite to reanimation, it's like seconds.

SPEAKER_04 45:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:47

It's really fast. So you don't get and they don't seem to like hunger all that much to like actually eat, they just want to reproduce, right? So we don't get those scenes of like people being ripped apart. We don't get people's, you know, like faces being shot with guns because there's no guns in the movie, right? So there's not too many of those like really satisfying character deaths, but there's ones that like hit you really emotionally, like what you were saying about Songwa's death. When he gets bit, you're like, fuck, he would have been such a good father.

SPEAKER_05 46:20

He would have been such a such a such a good father. But it's it kind of feeds into my overall take about this movie, you know, the fear of return to fascism. Because once you're bit almost, it's like, no, it's over. Like, and then you just become another cog in the machine, essentially. And just like this mindless, blind thing, just again, consuming like capitalism, but also just with no interiority or exteriority. You're just a thing, essentially.

SPEAKER_01 46:48

Well, I want to jump into an actual scene, and I think it does back up your take. Adam. So, and that scene is once they first start to catch on that something is wrong. So, once they realize that something is wrong, they start like checking social media and the news, and the train has screens that are showing a news broadcast. And the broadcast has some type of government official, and he is announcing that there's violent riots breaking out across the country. He says that thanks to the government's rapid response, the aggressors are being contained. This is being said while people check their social media, they check their emails and messengers, and clearly the situation is worse than the government is letting on. I use Google Lens to uh translate some of those emails, and they say things about how like Korea is a zombie country. People asking, is this just the country or worldwide invasion? There's a dating website where there's an email subject that says, How can I date if I get eaten by zombies? And then there's another phone that comes up not long after that that has like the media perspective where the news articles like compared to the emails where people are like openly talking about zombies, another rule break for the zombie genre. People are openly talking about zombies in those emails, and then the compared to the news media that you see on another phone, those ones are saying large-scale protests, police injuries, civilian injuries, like severely downplaying it, saying the attackers are trying to like gain control of government property, which people are literally looking out the windows and observing that that is not the case. Right? What do we think about that scene?

SPEAKER_03 48:44

I think that there's there's a couple different ways we could tackle it. I mean, because from one perspective, I mean it's breaking the Romero rule that they poke fun at with like talking about zombies and calling them zombies.

SPEAKER_01 48:56

So I mean we that was joked about in Shawn of the Dead, and they literally say, like, don't say that. Don't say the the Z word.

SPEAKER_03 49:03

Yeah, the Z.

SPEAKER_01 49:04

It's just an unspoken rule in zombie movies that you don't say the word zombie.

SPEAKER_03 49:08

Yeah, and I think that that's one of the unique things about this film, too, on that level, is that they're like, no, that's literally what they are, and we're gonna call them that. So that's cool that they're down to, you know, break the rules and still come out with one of the best zombie movies of the decade. The thing I've found with a lot of films in South Korea is that mini films are hyper-critical of capitalism. And if they're not hyper-critical of capitalism, they're hyper-critical of the government. And I thought that was really interesting, and that's partly why like I went down the rabbit hole on like learning about Korean history, because it was I think it was around 2018-2019 when I saw a film called Tunnel, which was recommended to me by the great Michael Katron, also Hofstra alumni. There's a real famous, or maybe infamous, moment in South Korean history recently. In 2014, there was something called the Seawolf Ferry, and it sunk in a very tragic sense, where there's so much that goes into this. I couldn't even do it justice. But basically, this ferry sank, and one of the reasons purportedly is because there were more shipping containers on the ferry than what was reported. Um, so a lot of school children ended up dying because of this. And the government basically went on a manhunt for this wealthy individual who like owned the ferry or the company that owned the ferry. He was also a nutcase, like just an absolute religious nut. The filmmaker Bong Jun-ho was actually very critical of the government and the way that the government handled this. And then after President Park Junghee had to resign, it came out that Bong Jun-ho was on a blacklist that the government would not give him funds to make films because of how critical he was of the government and the way that the Seawolferi incident was handled. And the fact that the origin of the Chables under Park Chung-hee happened largely because these were family-run companies. Like companies like Samsung, LG, Hyundai, they are what are called Chables. And a Chabl is like a family company where the CEOs are inherited positions, like father to son. And I mean there's something like I read somewhere that like four companies Samsung, Hyundai, uh, I think LG, an SK group, are responsible for 40% of the Korean economy. These companies were allowed to flourish because of the government being a dictatorship. But it's also what created the modern Korean economy. Like the miracle on the Han River happened because a dictatorship allowed these family corporations to bring Korea into the modern world. It's interesting too because I've certainly noticed that a lot of Korean presidents, even in the democratic era, they get elected, they do their term, they leave office, and then they're almost immediately investigated, arrested, tried, and jailed for corruption. Like Lee Myung Bach, the president, I think before Park Gunhei, was like a really famous incident of that. But so yeah, it doesn't surprise me that they tackle that in the film, too, like criticizing the government and saying like the government's not reliable for a source of information. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 52:09

And also, like, you think about the talking head who I'm guessing is the the president, at least within the logic of the film, who's like, you know, as you're literally seeing images of people getting ripped by zombies being like, we've quarantined some areas, and it's all gonna be okay. It's it's it's literally Kevin Bacon and Admiral House going, be calm, all is well before he gets trampled. I think it's incredibly scathing there. And yet, it's hard to say because I'm somebody who, before the shit hit the fan here, I tried giving the government the benefit of the doubt more often than not, sometimes foolishly so, but because I'm like, look, I'm somebody who thinks, do your jobs, don't worry about like if you're relatable to me or not, just keep the fucking machine going, for the love of God. That's the social contract we have. You run everything, we contribute to the economy, and everybody's maybe not getting rich, but at least we're satisfied and we feel like everything's you know running smoothly. And then a monkey wrench gets thrown to the system, and next thing you know, we're all fucking losing our shit.

SPEAKER_01 53:09

In hindsight, does this remind you of anything? Oh, uh plenty.

SPEAKER_05 53:13

It reminds me of a lot.

SPEAKER_01 53:15

I mean the the whole thing, like the part of the reason that I highlighted this was because I mentioned like the first time I watched it, 2018. Second time first time I watched it, this scene, I interpreted the like the high stakes of the reality and the low stakes of the information coming from the government as what we hear about certain Asian governments, about like the state-run media, and that would be more associated with like North Korea or China. But to me, from my American perspective, that's how I interpreted this the first time. The second time, it was during COVID, and we're watching this pandemic unfold in real time on TV. So we get that information from him, and he's severely underplaying it. During COVID, we had Fauci and we had all the mega people saying that they're overplaying it. And like it's not the same, but you know, it's like same, same but different, right? Which would you guys prefer? Would you prefer the government underselling, or would you prefer it overselling but trying to tell you how to combat it? Even though in COVID, as we know, we were being given information all the time. Wash your hands, use all the hand sanitizer, and then we find out later, oh, it's airborne. Washing your hands was doing fucking nothing. Like, even if the information is inaccurate, like in the pandemic, like what we were seeing was the scientific method in real time, and people don't people didn't understand that. But would you prefer your government overselling it and like saying, oh, this is really fucking bad, but at least trying to help? Or would you prefer them underselling it and being like everything's fine?

SPEAKER_03 55:02

I would vastly prefer like a government or a regulatory body to oversell it, because you know, I think in some ways this some people might interpret what I'm about to say as being insensitive, but uh in the grand scheme of what could have happened, we got off lucky with COVID being what it was. And I say that in a zoomed out capacity because there are a lot of people who died during COVID. COVID was deadly. It killed so many people, and yet it could have been a virus with a 10% mortality rate. We had no idea what was going on with COVID.

SPEAKER_01 55:41

Could have been a zombie outbreak.

SPEAKER_03 55:42

Could have been a zombie outbreak. But for me, I sometimes wonder if with COVID the people who said, oh, it's nothing, and for us even having this conversation, I think it's partly because of all those dipshits that didn't take it seriously at all, because the government and the the the liberals were taking it so seriously. But yeah, I guess for me, I would rather a cautious overreaction. I mean, I don't think you need to be like, you know, welding people's doors shut, you know, or like some of the stories I heard out of China where they were going for like zero COVID policy. Like that's a bit extreme and hard to police because the moment one person gets it, everything shuts down again. Granted, a virus where you're turned into a a mindless husk that eats people. Maybe you want a zero policy there.

SPEAKER_05 56:31

Shall say this much. I'd like to live in a world where the you know sitting leader of the country doesn't tell you to inject yourself with bleach.

SPEAKER_03 56:38

Oh yeah, or shove like an ultraviolet light bulb up your butt.

SPEAKER_05 56:41

I'll agree with John real quick. I'm of the opinion that I would rather people overreact and then it turned out to not be as much than underreact and we all get caught with our pants down.

SPEAKER_01 56:52

I agree. Well, like I said before, the idea of seeing the scientific method in action, it's like they had a hypothesis that they had to test with COVID. It was this thing they've never seen before. They first had to learn like how do we collect a sample and store it? Like, what does it like? What does it not like? Like all of those things they're learning in real time. And they'd put it up there on information. You'd have like elected officials or Anthony Fauci getting up and like telling you information that months later we would come to find out had been like incorrect, but it was what they believed at the time. And that presentation really did not inspire trust in the government for people here in the United States. Alright, it's not, you know, contact-based, it's airborne, you know, that people took that as like, then why have we been doing all this shit? Why have you been wasting our time? Perhaps there was another way of reframing that, you know, for the next pandemic. Like, listen, this is what we think next week. It could be wrong, but I'll tell you what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna wash my hands. You know, like presented in a more like natural sort of way, and people are like, I guess I'll wash my hands. You know, maybe, maybe people will do that, but we learned seriously zero fucking lessons from COVID. People still just cough right into the open these days.

SPEAKER_03 58:13

I think for me, what they need to do with the next pandemic is that they just need to haul me onto the TV and just be like, take it from me, John Buley, the guy who wore a mask, and guess what happened? I never got COVID.

SPEAKER_01 58:27

You know, another thing we know from like multiple Asian cultures is that idea of like when you are sick and you get on public transportation, you just wear a mask. It's just what you do, and it was so difficult to get Americans to think about it. I think, you know, yeah, maybe it's a little forceful to be like wear a mask all the time, but like, you know, maybe trying to inspire people with the idea of like if you feel even a little bit sick, just wear the mask. Just wear a mask until you don't feel sick anymore. You know, if you're gonna go in public, like try to, you know, educate people in that way instead of like those, you know, bands that Americans really don't respond well to. We're anti-fascist for the dumbest fucking reasons. When you know the mask mandates were in effect and we're like, this is fascism. And I say we, I'm wasn't, it wasn't me, but you know, like a surprising percentage of Americans are like, this is fascism, and yet when we have like a police force throwing brown people into vans, they're like, that's just cleaning up the streets. Fuck, this place sort of sucks sometimes. Like, I just think it's interesting that that, you know, like an Asian country made this movie where like ultimately it's about like you got to work together, you gotta take care of each other, you can't just look out for yourself.

SPEAKER_03 59:49

Dude, I also like on theme with that, you know, during COVID too, when there were no masks, because some people had some common sense and then they were also assholes because they bought the entire supply at Amazon, along with all their toilet paper.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:01

Bezos, though, round of applause for that guy. He did great.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:05

Guy made so much money on masks and toilet papers.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:07

So much money in that pandemic.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:09

And he didn't pay a single dime on taxes.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:13

You did it. I get a random story, but during COVID, that was when like nobody knew where Gislaine Maxwell was. I was here in New Hampshire, and you know where she knows.

SPEAKER_03 1:00:24

She was like 10 minutes from where you live right now.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:27

She was, yeah, like minutes away from my uncle's farm. Not where I am right now, but my uncle's farm, and I spent a lot of time there during COVID. And I realized, like, I could have run into Gislaine Maxwell at fucking market basket and had no idea because, like, oh, how convenient.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:46

I'm literally just picturing you just going to the market standing next to her, looking at her, looking down, looking back, and just going, nah, nah, can't it can't be.

unknown 1:00:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:54

It'd be that easy. Yeah, anyone else got like a specific scene we can cover?

SPEAKER_05 1:00:58

So yeah, well, I I want to talk about the whole sequence at Dejan Station because I feel like that's a scene that's kind of the turning point for every single character involved. It's literally the midpoint of the film. But that's also when Suckwoo has his kind of revelation about having to help everybody else because leading up to that scene, you know, he had gotten the tip off that hey, when you get to that that town, you're gonna go right into quarantine. But if you go off to this side street, nobody's gonna know, and you can just kind of basically walk right through and get back to where you gotta get to. And obviously, through a lot of craziness and zombies and things not turning out the way everybody thought, because as it turns out, the military's all been infected, which leads to probably the most intense of the chases. You know, I would I would say this is probably the most intense scene in the film, but it's also the you know, we get, you know, Sang Hua getting his Han Solo moment when he just like back elbows one of the zombies to to save a couple folks.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:57

Yeah, and also the reversal of that scene before when Sok Wu closes the door on Song Hua's face. This time Sung Hua has the opportunity to do the same thing to Sok Wu, but instead he goes, Hey, asshole, and holds the door open for him, and Sok Wu gets that example of like he didn't have to do that, but if he made the same choice that I made, I would be dead. And that is really, I think, his first turning point on that path of realizing that he could be a better man.

SPEAKER_05 1:02:29

And it's again, like, thematically, it fits the film perfectly. It's a the whole door metaphor, if you think about it. Like, it's just it's an easy shorthand when you're trying to help somebody out, just in life, you're opening a door for them. When you're not, you're closing a door in their face. So the metaphor hits perfectly there.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:46

And he he literally gets to walk in Sungwa's shoes. This is the situation that this other guy was in. Now you're in it, right? How would you feel if he slammed the door closed in your face? Right? It's that empathy that we keep talking about that this film has that it like it really makes these characters feel each other and like learn to work together and learn to find the good in each other and overcome and like play to each other's strengths and weaknesses.

SPEAKER_05 1:03:17

It's also the moment where like Suann, who had already been very much critical of her father, that's like her breaking point. You know, because obviously they're gonna go off in their place and kind of lead everybody to the trap, essentially, and he's explained to his daughter, like, no, we have to think for ourselves, and the homeless man that had been brought up earlier, the one that kind of stowed away into the train, he sees them going off and he wants to follow them. And that's Su Anne being like, Well, he's coming, right? And Sakwoo is like, No, he's not coming with us. It's just the two we have to look out for it's it's just us now. And that's when she like literally reads her Father the Riot act where it's like, all you care about is yourself and that's it. And it's almost like he the a bell goes off for him then too. That might also be the oncoming zombie onslaught that could have done it for him, but I like to think it was the the wisdom of a of a small child in a a perilous time.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:10

Yeah, and Suan being the innocence of the film, that she doesn't follow him. The instinctual good thing to do would be to not do what Suk Wu is trying to do. And she doesn't go with him, and she is only saved because of Song Hua, who comes and grabs her and brings her to safety. It's again, you know, that that moral devil and angel for Suck Wu of like seeing that his own mistakes, like if he did that, he would get himself and his daughter killed, and his daughter doesn't even want to deal with his shit anymore. It's just what pulls him over to that light side.

SPEAKER_05 1:04:49

I also kind of want to talk about the zombies themselves a little bit and how they're kind of portrayed as again, like the horde element of it is the terrifying part for me. Not just that they can run fast, not that they do the you know, World War Z kind of tidal waving over each other, but the fact that, you know, they need light because they're blind, because their eyes are literally dead. The fact that they're driven by the one just like all-consuming, just not just wanting it for like flesh, because you can tell that not like eating the people. They're just biting them. There's really no like viscera or anything about it. Their whole thing is just to assimilate as many folks as they can into the horde. Which makes them utterly terrifying. And yet, in a weird way, they're kind of beatable. Because again, you you think about any kind of darkness, they're blind for a minute and they can't kind of see, they're fumbling around.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:43

They're beatable in that they have weaknesses, but like you know, we talk about the the absence of guns in this movie. Like, we take that for granted as to just how defeatable a zombie is in like an American film because of the guns and like the weapons. And rustic nature of this country, you know, like all they have on that train is baseball bats. And it is surprisingly difficult, you know, to like beat a zombie and like what do we know? We gotta, you know, break their skull in some way. That's not an easy thing to do with your bare hands.

SPEAKER_05 1:06:16

It's not, but it's also because as we flash forward a bit, because the military is still very much a presence in this film. Like eventually it's gonna get to the point where the zombies are gonna confront guns. For the people on the train, it really is just a matter of can you survive till you get to Busan? And how you do you survive? You know, with cunning, because it's again, the zombies are flawed. There are flaws that you can exploit in order to kind of stay one step ahead. They literally can't open doors. I mean shit, if you really want to think about it from that perspective, all the passengers really had to do to stay alive was just, alright, let's all fucking take five seconds, take a breath. Let's just all of us keep moving to a car where we're at least three car lengths away from the zombies. I know granted it's a train, it's a confined environment, but that first scene where you know they kind of have them all contained and you know Sokwoo almost makes the wrong decision. But like, all they had to do is just leave all the zombies kind of contained and you're good. And yet because everybody's overly paranoid freaking the fuck out over this and not knowing how to react, and look, I've said this a couple times on the show, if I'm in a zombie apocalypse, I'm probably not making it. I I've I've come to to accept that I'm the most I'm not the most in-shape guy. I cannot run a zombie, I probably get fucked, especially if they're sprinting zombies. But I would like to think in my heart of hearts I'd be the one guy in that room going, hey guys, look, they literally can't open doors. We literally just put newspapers up on our windows and they can't even see us for Christ's sake. Let's just all I don't know. Anybody got any weed on them? Somebody just let's fly.

SPEAKER_03 1:07:50

Not in South Korea, they don't. They don't? Weed is very illegal there.

SPEAKER_05 1:07:53

Well maybe they should reconsider this and we'll use Train de Basan as a way to get legalization. See if they just all just sat in the one of the cars and smoked a joint and just let the train, you know, drive to its conclusion. Hey, maybe it should have been it differently for them.

SPEAKER_02 1:08:06

Yeah. See this movie here, this is why weed should be legal.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:10

Sort of uh Monday morning quarterbacking the zombie apocalypse there. Right? Like, well, you know, I'd just be the guy who's like, you know, I know all these things that the movie tells you over the course of two hours.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:21

Hey man, this is this is a media literacy podcast above and beyond anything else. We're teaching people life lessons about how to deal with life through movies.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:31

Yeah, I think I think John said in another one of these uh zombiester episodes that a zombie apocalypse would really not fare all that well because we all know what to do from watching so many zombie movies. Like, there's government joke websites about like how the CDC would handle a zombie apocalypse, you know, that are like from the CDC.

SPEAKER_05 1:08:54

God help us if it's vampires.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:57

Oh, well then we're fucked. It's so baked into the consciousness that like if a zombie outbreak ever started, like maybe they would actually contain it. But the thing about the zombies is like if there's one, like it can just keep going, and you never really know if you got all of them, and it can just sort of break out anywhere. Or you get so many of them that things just literally become overwhelmed. Which I think that's like the perspective this film takes on zombies. The horde. Shawn of the Dead, it was like, you know, a few zombies at a time, and like, you know, some interpersonal ones, like some very zombies you knew before. Um, Knight of the Living Dead, it was just a few of them. This movie you see like zombie fluid dynamics. Like what happens when there's so many of them pushing against the same glass window that they all start pouring out of it like a liquid. Which is, you know, one thing that you you do see in some of the more modern ones, like uh World War Z, where like the zombies start to become faster moving. I think that this film strikes a very good in-between point of like the Romero slow-moving ones, uh, the Zack Snyder sprinting zombies, and then like the World War Z zombies that are almost portrayed like insects in some of those like wider shots. They look like ants like crawling all over each other. Like, John, you've you've made a point before of like the reality of a zombie outbreak is that the military would just tear through it immediately. But do you think that Trained Busan makes a good point that maybe that is a realistic possibility of them being overwhelmed by the sheer numbers?

SPEAKER_03 1:10:37

Yeah. So whenever I talk about a zombie apocalypse and the military ripping through it, I'm usually talking about it in the context of the United States. Because we just have so much, like, large swaths of land. Like, cities in America would definitely be a problem. New York would be a real rough spot for a zombie apocalypse. I think Train de Busan does lay out a very realistic scenario of the military being overwhelmed.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:03

Like, there's a shot in it that's also during that montage of like when people are looking on their phones and getting the like the media intake. And that's like those skater kids, and then they look up and there's the military helicopter with like zombies hanging off of it, and then they fall and they tear through the skater kids. And like, unfortunately, you know, now there is a visual from the real world that I have from that, which is the 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan, where the military was leaving and the Taliban was taking back over, and there's military planes taking off with people hanging off the fucking landing gear, right? Like just a harrowing image. So to see it in this movie, like that wasn't there, you know, last time I saw this, or that you know, that real thing hadn't happened yet, and it does show like just how dangerous this could actually be should something like that ever happen because of just the sheer number of them. Like the military only has a certain number of bullets, they have to make headshots. Nothing else really works other than a direct headshot, like bombs and you know, fire and all that shit. It's just more destructive than what it's actually worth. Fuck I I do think that we would be fucking destroyed should anything like that ever happen. Especially after COVID, because we wouldn't work together.

SPEAKER_03 1:12:24

Dude, I remember there's there's one section, I think it's when the zombies first turn into a horde on the train, like within the first hour of the film, and it's just going through on a dolly shot, following like down the aisle, and you just see the zombies just like ripping through the screen, just like sprinting along. I remember watching that when I was preparing for this episode and just being like, oh, this is this is like the most intense the genre's ever been. This is like I've seen the movie before, and I'm still like it knees in my chest that whole first hour of the film.

SPEAKER_05 1:12:59

I want to make a larger point because um talking about the zombies and talking about kind of how we structure these, you know, these month-long arcs as it were, and something that was kind of in my head, and Anthony, you bringing up the the Romero rules so much in this episode. Would you count Change of Passan as a subversive text when it pertains to the zombie genre in of itself?

SPEAKER_01 1:13:20

The thing like the speed at which they move, the reanimation of animals, the less bloodlust, more reproductive, like motivation thing. I mean, I think that any entry into the genre picks and chooses, you know, and as long as you get like within the general ballpark, like you fall into the genre. And then there's like the much more strict Romero centric rules, like the walking dead. I would say the walking dead stuck strongly to the Romero rules. And until like the spin-offs where they started having like, you know, some weird other shit. I wouldn't call it subversive in that way of like that it's you know, like relying on the tropes. Like, if you're gonna be in the zombie subgenre, you're gonna have zombies, and you can't make them too far off from what a zombie is before it's something else.

SPEAKER_05 1:14:13

Because to your point, and look, it plays kind of fast and loose with like even the death, like look, obviously there's a deer at the beginning that gets hit by the truck and then reanimates. Obviously, some victims get worse than others, even with the lack of gore. But there are some victims where it feels like once you're bit, that's it. You're you're you're cooked. And it's not a matter of like you're dead and then you come back. It's like I'll give you an example, even though we don't really see him as a zombie, but like Sang Hua, when he gets bit, it does take him a little bit longer than most. But when he starts turning, it's not like he like collapses and then comes back. It's like he's literally turning into a zombie real time.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:48

Pretty much goes straight into it, yeah. Like he's fighting and fighting and fighting, and then his eyes go glassy, and then he just turns around, you know, and and now he's with the zombies. And that's the most dangerous. You don't want a song called a zombie.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:01

Which is why I like because I I interpreted because we don't really see him as a zombie, like that the whore just trampled him. I don't know, maybe it's like in the back of my mind, I'm just like, I don't want to see him as a zombie. I like the guy too much.

SPEAKER_01 1:15:12

Yeah, I'm glad that would have been, and honestly, it also would have just been a hat on a hat for them to have to re-face them later as a zombie. Like, that's another emotional element that you have for Sung Kyung and Suan, and for everybody to have to like face him again. So I'm cuz I'm glad they just like sent him off right after that.

SPEAKER_05 1:15:29

And because again, like, is this an infection like 28 days? Are they actual reanimated corpse? Are they dead? Because I'm also sitting there thinking to myself, like, as far as we know, the deer is the first zombie. As far as we know. So it's a simple matter of the deer goes back into its ecosystem and kind of pollutes it from there. The thing that we joked about, like, do zombie deers, you know, just eat other deers, or do they just go about their regular business but now they're zombies? You know, does it stand to reason that zombie deer runs across a couple of tourists? Oh, look at the cute deer! Let's go feed it. Ah, the deer bit me.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:05

Yeah, where's that city in Japan where people get bit by deer all the time?

SPEAKER_03 1:16:09

Oh, yeah, that's in that's in Nara.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:12

But the point being is like, is that the start of it?

SPEAKER_03 1:16:14

So just a little minor interjection. They don't get bit by deer. Sometimes the deer will get feisty because you've run out of treats, but like they don't really bite you.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:23

I'm sure people get bit by one of those things. Oh, they they do, but like every once in a while.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:29

Yeah, but they're known more for bowing. Bowing? Yeah, like if you bow to the deer, the deer will bow to you, and then you feed it a little snack.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:38

Exactly. Just give let them eat out your hand, and but you never know. You get you get nicked by a deer tooth, and next thing you're you're craving human flesh and wanting to turn your game.

SPEAKER_01 1:16:52

Who gets bit by the zombie.

SPEAKER_03 1:16:54

You become a zombie because you got bit by a deer. It's the lamest way to become a zombie.

SPEAKER_05 1:16:59

But just like I I think about stuff like that where because look, obviously we're gonna get to the final image, and I think the final image is definitely a subversion on a very famous scene from a zombie film. Even if the zombies themselves aren't subversive elements, I do think that there is enough there. Because they do kind of play fast and loose with the rules that you can kind of stretch it, like I said. Because it breaks enough rules where it's like, alright, you're like even the sprinting zombie, which this movie didn't invent, obviously, that it always felt unnatural to me. Cool, don't get me wrong, but always felt unnatural.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:30

Well then let's get into the closing images. So here, John, please walk us through the last couple minutes of trained Busan.

SPEAKER_03 1:17:38

Following Soakwoo's altruistic sacrifice to save Suan and Song Kyung, the train stops at a barricade before a tunnel. Our two heroines walk carefully towards it, past the carnage of the zombies and the soldiers. They enter the darkness of the tunnel. On the other side, the military, rifles aimed downrange, spot Suan and Song Kyung. The military are unable to confirm visually if the two are infected, and Command instructs them to kill. But before they pull the trigger, Suan tearfully sings a song that echoes through the tunnel. The soldiers rush to save them as they are survivors. The final image is on Suan, as she continues to tearfully sing Aloha Oi, the song from her recital that Sokwoo missed earlier because of his job.

SPEAKER_05 1:18:22

I literally yelled, fuck you, because I thought that they were gonna pull Knight of the Living Dead. I literally remembered full well just sitting in my bed last night, and the second that they're doing the walkie, like, yeah, uh, what do we do here? And the voice on the video said, kill 'em. I'm just like, up, here it comes. Here it comes, and I'm gonna be very mad, John, tomorrow when we're doing the episode. Because I I do think the filmmakers did realize, like, look, this film is very much a tragedy. You know, suck wook for for all we've talked about, like him getting, you know, trying to learn how to be an altruistic person and you know be a better father. The tragedy of this film is he does not get to do that. Because sure, he does the heroic sacrifice, but all that growth and he's not gonna be able to kind of live on to become a better man.

SPEAKER_01 1:19:10

In contrast to that, like it depends on what your take is here, because his first act that we see was a selfish one. His final act was a selfless one. That is a full act. Like, everyone else could have, you know, he could have selfishly stayed on the train and like kept his daughter under threat of himself, but like his last decision is to is to jump off and his story is done. But like the thing with the tunnel and like this feeling that is gonna be a direct tie into Knight of the Living Dead and they're gonna get shot. I actually did like forget that this ended the way that it did. Like when watching that, like I see that rifle scope go up on Sue An and uh Song Kyung, and like I forgot for a second and when questioned like, wait a minute, do they just fucking cap them at the end? Like, is that how this ends? Is that why I cried last time? And like, no, it's it doesn't quite get there. But it still leaves you, like, it really leaves you with this broken feeling. It has the best possible outcome for well, I guess that's I shouldn't say best possible outcome for Sue Ann. The best possible outcome was that a zombie outbreak wouldn't happen and her parents would get back together.

SPEAKER_03 1:20:23

I think what's interesting for me is like I had mentioned earlier about how the this film and a lot of Korean visual media possesses a lot of empathy from a writing standpoint. I think what I also find fascinating too is there's a lot of empathy for the audience and what they're watching as well. Because, you know, like Adam was saying, he's coming from it from an American mindset. Like we've seen Knight of the Living Dead. That's like about as bleak of an ending as it can get. And they had the opportunity to do the same thing here. They had the opportunity to make just the bleakest ending possible. And what is and I've said this on a previous episode with Andrew as well. One of the reasons that I really had a hard time with like the slasher genre and a lot of American horror for quite a period of time is because of that same thing. A lot of American horror has incredibly nihilistic endings. Like everybody dies at the end. And it's like, yeah, death comes for us all, but like, cool. Like, I'll watch a movie with that theme. I'll watch a drama about that. You know, I'll watch I'll watch a bleak ass war movie about like the fall of man. But with this, there's empathy for the audience here as well to say we we could kill these last two characters, but then the audience is going to feel cheated because they got so close and they couldn't make it. And with all of the social criticisms that this film has, I think by sparing the two of them, it also showcases it to put it in a quippy sort of way, it's like it puts people over profits.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:58

I mean, we talk about like the American-centric viewpoint and the Korean-centric viewpoint for this film. For, you know, the filmmakers making it from like their culture. But like when you put them in direct comparison like this, Night of the Living Dead, you know, Ben endures this entire night in spite of everyone fucking up the situation around him, only to get shot by the roving posse of just random people with guns rounded up by a sheriff and like taken out to, you know, kill zombies, and they end up killing people. Shawn of the Dead, you had like a tactical military strike, and that's why your characters, you know, make it out at the end, not getting shot with the rest of the zombies. In uh Train de Busan, you get that too, but like you know, we said about the diminishing presence of guns, like through these three films, this is the only time you see a gun in the film. It's the sniper's rifle watching this safe zone. And the fact that the choice is made for the gun not to go off, again, like that is what I'm trying to get through with my overall take here of like the ability to survive a crisis is the ability to just have like the smallest amount of trust for each other. Like the American version, they would have just pulled that fucking trigger dog. The Korean version, they gave it two seconds to listen to a couple bars from Aloha Way, and it like saved a child's life, you know, and like it almost feels critical of us, critical to the American-centric ending for a similar film. Like, let's see how this train to New York remake of it is gonna be. I bet it has a shitload of guns in it.

SPEAKER_03 1:23:50

It's also tying into that too, as much as I like the Zack Snyder Dawn of the Dead remake, the one thing for me that always drives me crazy about that movie is the ending sucks. Like, like they get through the whole they get they get through the whole thing, and then s uh Sarah, I think it's Sarah Paulie, is the lead in that. She gets on the boat, they get to the island, and what's on the island, a bunch of zombies, and then they die. And I'm just like, could you just have given me like the possibility that they made it out?

SPEAKER_01 1:24:21

Yeah, I would have preferred just sailing into the sunset end of the movie. Yeah. But no, they they had to few throw a couple more jokes in there and uh some found footage elements.

SPEAKER_03 1:24:32

Yeah, it's like I get it, it's 2004, the you know, Phantom Fury and Fallujah was like a nightmare. But like, give us an ending, guys, that doesn't kill everybody. I don't know.

SPEAKER_05 1:24:43

If they did the thing, again, we talk about like, you know, certain facets of movies that why their successes and why they're failures with the audience ultimately, they kill the kid at the end of this movie. We would have heard tell of they were burning cinemas in South Korea after watching Train to Basan. Like, this is a movie that you already you already put the audience through enough of a a ringer as is, with most of the characters dying, with the essential lead of the film dying after kind of figuring his shit out so he won't be able to actually apply it. If they do the thing and they kill the kid at the end of the film.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:20

Let's take the cutest kid imaginable.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:23

Who's done nothing but the right thing, who had to get admoshed by her father for giving up her seat to a grandmother.

SPEAKER_01 1:25:30

Okay the cutest kid imaginable with an incredible moral compass and just wants to take a train to see your mom, never did nothing to nobody, and let's throw thousands of zombies at this child and then kill her at the end. Yeah, they would they would have you're right, they would have burned theaters to the ground.

SPEAKER_05 1:25:48

And we can we can sit there and say, like, how you know, again, international films, in this case the South Korean market, like they tend to understand filmmaking better than we do currently, which also means that they have good commercial instincts and know well enough not to cross that bridge.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:04

Yeah, and not not just a child, but a pregnant woman.

SPEAKER_05 1:26:07

That too.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:08

Yeah. Yeah, which I think is like another sort of symbol, you know, just to add layers to the like the metaphor I was already trying to build here of like working together, we endure, working only for ourselves, people die. Adding the fact that she is a pregnant woman, like that idea of humanity enduring, like it's not just survival of the people that are already alive, but the like the continuation of life. And I think like the fact that it's the two of them walking through is you know just a nice little detail to like a cherry on top of that metaphor. So, how many gallons of tears? Let's just go around in that last scene. Does it does it get anyone else like really worked up in that tunnel when she's singing Aloha Way?

SPEAKER_03 1:26:54

Yeah, I I knew, like, I knew what was coming because I remember I the first time I saw that ending, I was a wreck.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 1:27:04

I was I was distraught the first time I saw that ending. And even knowing what was coming and having seen the film a couple of times, like, ugh, it it was still God, it was still really hard.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:19

To the point where again, second viewing, I'm like, I I I'm good. I'm good for a few years.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:25

I'm just gonna watch the part where it's the characters getting to know each other.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:31

And then wait. The second half, I'm sure it's fine.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:33

I'm sure, yeah. And I'm sure they all figured their shit out.

SPEAKER_01 1:27:37

Yeah, and then they get to Busan.

SPEAKER_05 1:27:39

Yeah, then they get to Bussant, and the the girl's mom is waiting for her and the family's reunion Exactly. I'm I'm I'm I'm now I'm thinking like explaining movies to my kid, hypothetically speaking, and just like, Daddy, what happened? Then and then they all lived happily ever after. Now let's go to bed before uh Uh before this next scene, okay?

SPEAKER_02 1:28:02

They got to Busan and there were it was the one place that the zombies didn't get to.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:07

Yeah. There was a water park. Punch was served. Alright, let's talk about the legacy of this movie. What do you think? Uh do you think this movie paved the way for anything else? Yeah, what do you take from it?

SPEAKER_03 1:28:24

Yeah, so there was a sequel to this film.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:27

Yeah, Peninsula.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:28

Yeah, there was Peninsula. There was also an animated film, I believe, made by the same director called Soul Station, which I think was I think it released it was either right before or right after this film. But it's a tie-in.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:42

I see it listed as the same year. SoulSt on IMDb comes up earlier, despite them both being listed in the same year, so it might have been listed on IMDb first.

SPEAKER_03 1:28:52

Yeah, it probably released a few months earlier. So there was that, but there's um there's another zombie film that came out, I think, in like 2020 or 2021, called Hashtag Alive, which I've also seen. I think it's quite good. It's not trained to Busan level, but I remember.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:10

Is it from the same director or is it just another Korean zombie film? It's a different director. But it is out of Korea.

SPEAKER_03 1:29:17

Yes, it's out of Korea. It stars Yu A-in, who is also the lead in God's favorite movie Burning. Uh but yeah, uh hashtag alive I thought was quite good. There's also a there's also a K-drama that came out, I think in like 2022, called All of Us Are Dead. And that was a very popular show as well. So I would venture that Train de Busan. I would venture that it probably kickstarted a bit of a zombie interest in South Korea or at least created some semblance of viability. I haven't heard of examples beyond those two.

SPEAKER_01 1:29:58

And I mean I got one. There's uh two seasons of a Netflix series um called Kingdom that takes place in Korea during the medieval Joseon dynasty. If you haven't watched that, oh my god, dude. Because not only is it a drama, it's it's a period piece, like a regal period piece, but also a zombie movie. It fucking rips. It's so good.

SPEAKER_03 1:30:23

Dude, I told people for years that Kingdom is what the Walking Dead should have been. Yeah, there's zombies and and shit in that, but man, it was all about the political turmoil going on in like the Josone dynasty, and it's it's just like bruh.

SPEAKER_01 1:30:42

Yeah, like the continuation of uh of a ruling bloodline once the king dies. But like you know, unique for the zombie genre. What if he dies, but then sorta, you know, it sort of comes back. Yeah, oh my god. It's a little bit weakened at Bernie's in that way. Oh, if we just pop some sunglasses on the king. They won't no one will know he's a good one.

SPEAKER_03 1:31:07

Yeah, that's that's that's crazy that I forgot about that show because I I remember watching that right in the middle of the pandemic, like literally March 2020.

SPEAKER_01 1:31:18

We have fun talking here about like the differences in just like how different countries handle things, but it was like really cool to see it in another like another time period and another culture. You know, like the fun of a zombie movie is like how people, you know, go who going through their regular life figure out how to get out of their situations. Like, we think about what our ideal way of surviving the zombie apocalypse is it like I'm gonna go to Walmart, I'm gonna like fucking board up all the doors in the middle of the night, and that's gonna be my kingdom. I'm gonna like fortify it with spikes and you know, all like whatever you think about how you're gonna like endure the zombie apocalypse. To see it in 1700s Korea, it's like, you know, the ways that the people come up with to defeat zombies because they are a flawed monster, you know, is just a completely unique thing. Like one one scene I think they distract a bunch of them to get them all running a certain direction with like a kite that's at like attached to some sort of wagon or something. I don't know, it's just it's really cool. I I love seeing like all the different takes on it. I do think that Korea's been doing some of the best work in the genre lately.

SPEAKER_05 1:32:29

I can't really add anything onto Legacy as much. I will say this. The next time I'm on set with people that are considerably younger than I am, I might grow them about this film in particular because I feel like this is a film like Sean, this is a film like Scott Pilgrim, this is a film like for that reason in full sale, guy Richie Sherlock Holmes, that you get a sense that like a bunch of film school kids are like, yeah, train the basan, that's like my fucking movie. Like, so can I tell you about the direct legacy at least stateside now? Not really, but the movie just turned 10 this year. And already it seems like in the Krane market at least, like there's been a bit of a zombie boom coming off of this film. But I think honestly, though, this is one of those films that I can guarantee right now is being celebrated in every film school across the nation, at least here. And might be one of those, you know, that next crop of great directors like Train of Bassan, number one zombie film, made me want to make zombie films.

SPEAKER_03 1:33:32

Yeah, I think something that will be really interesting for me to see in a in a couple years is with where American filmmaking has been in the last, I would say like 10-15 years. You know, a lot of the a lot of the biggest name directors in Korea, uh Bong Jun-ho being the most notable, that man studied everything. And as we all remember, when he won Best Director for Parasite at the Oscars, he specifically thanked Martin Scorsese because he like he just voraciously studied Scorsese, along with many of the other greats. But he he was really inspired by there was a lot of inspiration from Western filmmakers that informed his work. He was also inspired by some of the lost Korean greats that got a new kind of a new retrospective like Kim Ki-young, but it took like until the 90s for people to really rediscover his work. But because of the last 10 to 15 years in American cinema, I know for me personally, uh a lot of my voice is inspired as a filmmaker by like Bong Jun-ho and Park Chan Wuok and and uh over in Hong Kong with filmmakers like Wang Kar Wai. So it'll be really interesting for me to see how many like new film school students are gonna be citing South Korean filmmakers over like contemporary American filmmakers.

SPEAKER_01 1:34:51

Yeah, I mean I think like the the film school the situation that you're in, like you're just exposed to so many different types of things. And I think that especially now, like when we were in, I would say that it was like, yeah, there's a couple of students that had like a high interest in like really seeking out international films, and I'd say that you were one of them, John. Another one, Mike Catrone, I I would say. And you know, I thought like I think of Mike Katrone, it's like, well, he was more into like martial arts sort of like action picks, and like he watched the raid movies and then went and made like his version of the raid or the raid redemption, where it's just like a floor-by-floor tower fight. And I feel like train to Busan is like similar vein as the raid. Instead of floor by floor, it's train car by train car. And I could see a film student such as myself who wants to make a zombie movie. But if I'd seen it while I was in film school, I probably would have tried to come up with my train to Busan, or like steal steal from it in my student films.

SPEAKER_03 1:35:55

Yeah, I would have lost my shit if a movie came out, if this came out when I was in college.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:00

For as much as I've dabbled in the zombie genre, I think I've only ever actually put one zombie to film, and that was you, John.

unknown 1:36:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:10

I put John in a in one of my movies as a zombie, but he's like working in an office building and he's eating a salad. I like tat I put a bunch of like punk rock tattoos and like straight edge X's on his hands and he's fucking like a big thing.

SPEAKER_02 1:36:24

Yeah, I think you put like a black flag tattoo on me.

SPEAKER_01 1:36:27

Yeah. He's a zombie, but like he doesn't partake, man.

SPEAKER_03 1:36:34

Alright, that does it for this week, and that also wraps up Zombie Easter 2026. We hope you enjoyed this feast of flesh that we prepared for you all month. And if you have any fun ideas for future multiple episode blocks that you would like to hear, feel free to leave us your suggestions in our trusted comment sections. As always, thanks to Adam and Anthony for their insight. Thank you to Andrew Schwartz for creating the podcast and the music. Tune in next time for another exciting film, which also involves eating people, but this time they're live! So from all of us here at the show, good night, and don't eat too much brains now. It'll go right to your thighs.