Reading IndieWire critic David Ehrlich’s review of Train to Busan is a weird experience. What comes across as a mixed but positive-leaning review, somehow ends with a grade of a C+.
Ehrlich’s review reminds me of a piece I published two years ago called “A Critique of Critics.” I observed then that critics who insist on “grading” movies seem to get a kick out of being hyperbolically harsh. I also noted that critics tend to have pre-conceived notions of what makes a movie “good.” When the movie doesn’t fit their rubric, they decide it’s bad, regardless of whether the movie was enjoyable.
In Ehrlich’s case, his decision to deem Train to Busan a C+ movie seemingly comes down to his observation that, in the movie’s third act, “the characters whittle away into archetypes.” He notes that the film goes from being the work of a “sneaky chess master who arranges his pieces for a blindside attack” to a cartoonish work, that lets its flawed protagonist off the hook by introducing “an unbelievably scummy and selfish villain to shoulder all of the movie’s awfulness.”
I suppose the difference between myself and Ehrlich as critics (at least when it comes to this movie), is that Ehrlich puts himself in the role of mere evaluator. When I watch movies, however, I identify with their directors. When I don’t quite like something, I’m not happy to just say that. Rather, I try to imagine a rebuilding of the story.
So, what is Train to Busan all about? The film is the story of Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) and his daughter Su-an (Kim Su-an). Seok-woo is your typical, over-worked, business-office movie-dad. He is divorced from his wife and lives with Su-an. Seok-woo is comically bad at giving birthday presents, and Su-an expresses an overt preference towards spending time with her (supposedly non workaholic) mother. As a birthday present, Seok-woo decides to take his daughter on a train trip to visit her mother in Busan, but lo and behold, a zombie apocalypse strikes Korea.
Train to Busan draws in viewers in two way. Firstly, it makes great use of its train setting, depicting it both as a terrifying constraining capsule, and a source of comedic safety (the zombies are not able to open the door knobs to travel between train compartments). Secondly, the film creates three-dimensional characters where no one sees them coming. A baseball player and his friend/girlfriend (Choi Woo-shik and Ahn So-he) seem like mere members of the rabble, but instead prove compelling and sensitive in their brief, coming-of-age experience. Sang-hwa (Ma Dong-seok), a gruff father-to-be in a blue suit, appears at first as a background character, before evolving into a stoic, unfailing hero. A pair of elderly sisters (Ye Soo-jung and Park Myung-sin) are almost forgettable until they demonstrate the impossible dilemma of whether to be selfish or selfless in the face undefeatable evil. And even clichéd Dad Seok-woo isn’t so clichéd. He’s not an aggressively masculine, dad-trope like Adam Sandler’s character from Click, but a soft-spoken person trying to improve himself.
Midway through the film, however, a non-zombie villain is introduced. Yon-uk (Kim-jin hee) is an executive with the train company, and he pushes for a hardline approach to the zombie infestation. Yon-uk leads a “mob” in the first class train compartment, that demands the other passengers to be locked out of their compartment. His argument is that these passengers might have been contaminated by the zombies.
As Yon-uk gets more screen-time, he shifts from serving as a cynical, policy-hardliner, to a cartoon villain. Unlike Ehrlich, I see some value to employing such a “cartoonish character.” In so far as Train to Busan is an anti-capitalist movie in its early moments, its critique is focused on the apolitical, business mundanity of Seok-woo: he goes to work each day to make profits for investors. But evil systems are not just carried out by mundane actors. Capitalism relies on its hoards of investors and neoliberal policy makers, sure, but we can’t overlook the contributions of the overtly-sinister either: actors ranging from the Koch brothers to Pinochet.
So Train to Busan’s problem is not that it features an over-the-top, arch elitist villain. But Ehrlich is on to something when he observes that Seok-woo’s arc as flawed-protagonist gets awkwardly interrupted. Seok-woo does transform over the course of the movie, but he does not come to question the ethics of his career. Instead of transforming from individualist to collectivist, he follows a more generic path from timidity to bravery.
The way I see it, the reason the movie’s arc takes this underwhelming shape, is that despite its political undertones, it is first and foremost a zombie film. When Yon-uk emerges and begins to propose the cruel idea that the bulk of the train’s passengers be locked in with the zombies, I thought I saw a plot twist coming. What if the film’s revelation was that Yon-uk was not the only bigot on the train (albeit he was still the worst)? What if the zombie virus was in fact treatable? What if it turned out it was wrong not simply to write off the possibly affected, but even those whose bodies had been transformed?
The message of such a film would be that whenever anybody is left behind, by a system, we should question the ethics of such a system. Donald Trump, for instance, was met with righteous disdain for putting “kids in cages.” Yet many of the liberals and moderates who repeated this phrase were probably not asking questions about what it means more generally to have strong borders. In liberal Canada, where I live, people can be deported or denied entry to the country because of criminal records, because they were not named on their family members’ paperwork, or because they are deemed to be drains on the medical system. Mainstream politicians don’t ask questions such as why double-punishment for foreign criminals is rational or moral, or whether one sick immigrant can possibly be a substantial drain on Canada’s medical resources. They just take the logic of a restrictive immigration system for granted: Of course there have to be medical exams! Of course criminals have to be deported!
Train to Busan could have beautifully taken on this kind of thinking by shocking its characters and audience alike, with the revelation that zombies are not in fact deserving of death and ostracization. But because it was a horror flick, and not pure political commentary, this idea probably never crossed the filmmakers’ minds.
By refusing to subvert the assumptions that zombies are hopelessly dangerous, Train to Busan confines itself to comparing the behavior of different humans when dealing with an extreme situation. As such, it cannot really serve as a commentary on the day to day injustice of capitalism or the class system in South Korea, America or elsewhere. If a zombie apocalypse were to happen, I would not be surprised if far more people than just elitist corporate officials start acting like Yon-uk.
David Erhlich and myself both agree that Train to Busan falls short as a piece of social commentary. Where Ehrlich and I part ways, however, is that I don’t believe this flaw ultimately damns it as a movie. Shoot for the moon and if you miss you’ll land amongst the stars. Train to Busan is not profoundly political, but it pushes enough in that direction to separate it from the pack.
I tried watching zombie classic Dawn of the Dead (1978) and gave up after thirty-minutes, bored by its simple shoot-em-up plot. Train to Busan, by contrast, can be loved by all kinds of film-viewers: the action and non-action oriented. It is a wonderful concoction, of suspense, timely comedy, and, most of all, heart. Whether its Sang-hwa’s mighty kicks or Su-an’s trembling song, this a movie with emotional beats that cannot soon be forgotten.
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