Once again a film of the ghost contest of Cannes 2020 arrives in the halls of Rome Film Festival 2020. This time we're talking about the sequel to the hugely popular South Korean zombie movie Train to Busan (2016) Peninsula (or Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula), directed once again by director Yeon Sang-ho.
Prisoners in Hell
This stand-alone sequel to the Asian horror film takes place four years after the original. After the outbreak of the zombie epidemic in Busan, the entire Korean peninsula has collapsed. Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won) is an ex-marine who fled South Korea with his brother-in-law Chul-min (Kim Do-yoon) who, like other lucky ones, took refuge in Hong Kong. In the escape, however, his sister (Chul-min's wife) tragically lost her life along with her nephew to the zombies. The incident still haunts Jung-seok, who made it his reason for living to protect his shattered brother-in-law from the loss of his family. When Chul-min agrees to return to Korea on a dangerous mission, the ex-soldier can't help but follow him to watch his back and protect him from harm. But the mission soon falls apart and the two find themselves trapped in their homeland, which has now become an apocalyptic landscape where zombies are the least of the problems.
The highly anticipated sequel to the beloved zombie-tinged horror approaches a post-apocalyptic Mad Max scenario, leaving aside the claustrophobic and disaster-movie qualities of fear that had made the fortune of the first chapter. Unfortunately relevant in the era of Covid-19, Peninsula favors hyperkinetic action, made up of car chases, shooter fights and a certain attention in presenting life in Korea at the mercy of the undead. Yes, because in this sequel the zombie element fades into the background, the real focus of the film is the desperate struggle for the survival of all the characters involved, from the actual protagonists to the surrounding characters and antagonists. The dichotomy of good versus evil, evil versus good, becomes rightly blurred in the film: in the face of cases (extraordinary and fantastic in this case, eh ..) of extreme difficulty and danger, human feelings are put to a severe test in front of the prospect. of a terrifying death in a country abandoned by God and the world.
Unfortunately, the film definitely stumbles more than it should on survival horror and dystopian science fiction clichés: the protagonist in crisis with an adverse world and a painful past, the tough female characters who have learned to overcome the limits of their own body and their sex, the madness (at times cartoonish) of certain surrounding figures and so on and so forth. A certain familiarity, then, with the world of videogames (for example with very high-profile titles such as The Last of Us and the genre of battle royal and shooter games) perhaps plays against the genre, less so when it comes to reasoning and underlining the harmonious relationship today between cinema and videogames. However functional, Peninsula is a pleasant heart-pounding horror that satisfies audiences (lovers of the genre and not) without high expectations, thanks to a satisfying direction and a good story. Hard to say, though, what fans of the hugely popular first chapter will think. We'll see.
