Do you remember when, in the wake of Train to Busan’s wild popularity and success, an American remake called “The Last Train to New York” was announced? Being a horror freak first, and a public transit lover second, I naturally joined in on the bashing of the concept. It felt silly given the state of American railways, and somewhat lousy American remakes paving its road (laying its tracks?); above all else, it seemed impossible to make work.

Train to Busan ripped like a firestorm through audiences across the globe in 2016 after its Cannes premiere because of its performances. It was a zombie movie that, in an era where the high saturation of zombie films had worn plenty of us out, felt like a radical change to the usual recipe. There was a once-in-a-lifetime synergy between actors, and I don’t think there was a single weak performance in the entire cast. The effects, the story, and hoo-boy that gutpunch of an ending, was in short, lightning in a bottle.

To think they could do that again, let alone think an American studio with few ties to the original cast and crew could, was a delusion. As much as I love Timo Tjahanto and James Wan, who were slated to direct and produce the film respectively, Last Train has been in development hell since 2018 for a reason, and I think that reason is not a lot of people have confidence in it making its money back.

And that last bit is what brings us to today’s conversation. A conversation about The Train to Busan franchise “sequel” that actually did happen, and was actually pretty commercially successful despite failing to please critics: Yeong Sang-ho’s 2020 film Peninsula.

PENINSULA IS AN ACTION HORROR ROLLERCOASTER—WHERE PEOPLE EXPECTED A HEARTBREAKER

You’ll notice the word sequel is in some incredibly heavy quotation marks, because the film only shares a universe with the original. Otherwise, it’s a standalone film, and a pretty weird one to follow up the first with either way. Peninsula isn’t even the first film to expand on the world of Train to Busan this way, since that would be the 3D animated prequel film Seoul Station which came before it, which Sang-ho also directed.

Seoul Station needs a whole article of its own to dissect because it is incredibly heavy, incredibly depressing, and serves as an appropriately serious insight into the early hours of the outbreak in Seoul and the rapid decay of society that ensued.

…Yeah, Peninsula, is not at all that.

Peninsula is an action-horror zombie apocalypse heist film more along the lines of Land of the Dead or Army of the Dead, filled with plenty of action set pieces that betray your idea of what a Train to Busan sequel would be like. It certainly starts off with a harrowing scene that would fit right at home in its predecessor: our main character, a military officer named Jung-seok, refusing to save a child and their parents in order to get his own family to a port for evacuation. And though he makes it to safety with them, it’s short-lived, as his family is killed by a stray infected on the boat, leaving behind only him and his brother-in-law Chul-min alive in the chaos.

Four years later, the estranged in-laws are brought together by a crime boss to head back into South Korea, now simply known as the Peninsula. Their mission is simple: retrieve a truck full of smuggled American cash back to the docks and receive $2.5 million each for their troubles. The 30-minute mark is where the film unmasks itself as being a much less serious affair, and the heist takes a backseat so we can watch a stone-faced teenage girl and her little sister drive through hordes and powerslide an SUV into a bunch of zombies.

Needless to say, it rules.

HIGH-OCTANE SETPIECES THAT MAKE REHASHED ZOMBIE MOVIE TROPES WORTH WATCHING

Between arena games with the undead, a rat king made of zombies, and Mad Max-esque chase sequences through a post-apocalyptic Seoul, Peninsula genuinely has some of the best action I’ve seen in a zombie movie to date. The film is absolutely more on the Dead Rising side of things rather than The Last of Us side, but it’s at its best when it’s embracing that.

On a technical level, the film suffers from depicting most vehicle stunts with subpar CGI. The set design of all the spaces outside of the computer-generated exteriors do feel pretty detailed, and the light flourishes we get out of existing zombie movie tropes you’ve seen before are fun. Peninsula doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but after decades of seeing the same stories play out over and over in zombie films, the bar has been raised far too high in the kind of inventiveness we’re expecting out of zombie b-movies. And this film is just inventive enough for me to work.

THE HEROES ARE NICE, BUT THE VILLAINS SHINE

But then, how are the people inhabiting this world? How are the performances? There are some pretty distractingly bad English-speaking actors early on in the film, given thick and poorly written exposition dumps they have to deliver. I will be honest with you and say that their acting was what initially made me turn my back on the movie a few years back. But do not make that same mistake, because the actual main cast is pretty great in this.

Granted, they’re playing the same characters you’ve seen in every zombie movie ever, but they’re not doing a bad job. Jeong-Seok (Gang Dong-won) is your typical stoic soldier who is making up for the people he couldn’t save; Min-Jung (Lee Jung-Hyun) is a mother who has had to become battle-hardened to protect her children. Together they drive a lot of the tension of the film and have good chemistry. Kwon Hae-hyo is pretty delightful as the senile veteran grandfather of Min-Jung’s group, Elder Kim, who plays with a ham radio, calling for non-existent backup and stylizing himself as a renowned tactician.  

But where the cast really glows is in its three main villains: Captain Seo, Private Kim, and Sergeant Hwang. They’re members of Unit 631, an abandoned military taskforce meant to secure civilians, who in four years of solitude have gone completely insane, and they nail this. Actor Kim Min-Jae plays Hwang with a sadist’s glee that would have him at home as part of some The Walking Dead antagonists, but I loved the acting of Kim Kyu-baek as the mealy-mouthed human eel that is Private Kim. It’s a shame they don’t interact that much in the movie, since they’re enemies for most of the runtime, but they both are phenomenal.

LIVING IN THE SHADOW OF TRAIN TO BUSAN

It is far from flawless, but all in all Peninsula is a pretty good film. At the very least, it’s a fun film despite some of its quality issues. I would say it even achieves a level of decent rewatchability. It was fun enough to lure audiences in globally even during the midst of a pandemic, making its money back handily; it even charted at the international box office with the biggest IMAX run in several countries in Southeast Asia according to Deadline.

Critics’ reviews were certainly not shining, but they also weren’t piling on the film, either. That didn’t come until later, when online chatter really began to focus on Peninsula just not being another Train to Busan. Despite being very clearly titled as a spin-off (with the promotional material marked Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula), everything I had heard about the movie at the time of its release, up until a few months ago, was a conversation about how it failed as a sequel.

The first review that pops up for the film on Google, as well as hundreds of reviews on IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes, deride the film for not being a good continuation when it never could have been. Compound that with the technical and performance issues mentioned, and it was very clear a loud contingent of fans of Train to Busan saw this as nothing but a cash grab, an idea that spread out and kind of harmed the reputation of the film online as a result.

In reality, Peninsula has a lot of intention and love put into it by Yeong Sang-ho, and it ends up being a wild expansion of the world he’s made. It’s very clear the movie was an experiment in cutting loose and having fun with the setting after a bleak prequel and a heartbreaking masterpiece. In a way, it tells a funny story of success: Sang-ho had gotten his licks in with one cinematic juggernaut and charmed the world, and Peninsula was just meant to be high-octane gravy for the accolades.

Whether his teased plans to expand into a Peninsula sequel and television series will ever come to fruition is unknown. But if they don’t, it doesn’t really matter; Peninsula already proves through its flaws that Sang-ho can take you for a wild ride when he wants– all you have to do is let him.

Happy watching horror fans!