Train to Busan

Train to Busan is a 2016 South Korean zombie apocalypse horror thriller film directed by Yeon Sang-ho and starring Gong Yoo, Jung Yu-mi and Ma Dong-seok The film had its premiere in the Midnight Screenings section at the 2016 Cannes Film Festival on 13 May. On 7 August, the film set a record as the first Korean film of 2016 to break the audience record with over 10 million theatergoers.

An animated prequel, Seoul Station, was released less than a month later. The film serves as a reunion for Gong Yoo and Jung Yu-mi who both starred in the 2011 film The Crucible.

Plot
Seok-woo, a divorced fund manager, decides to take his young daughter Su-an to her mother in Busan as her birthday gift. They board the KTX (a Korean High-speed rail) at a station in Seoul. The train is also occupied by the tough working-class husband Sang-hwa and his pregnant wife Seong-kyeong, a high school baseball team, rich but selfish COO Yon-suk, elderly sisters In-gil and Jong-gil, and a homeless man.

As the train departs, a spasmodic young woman boards the train with a bite wound on her leg, and she soon succumbs to the zombie infection. Zombified, she attacks a passing female train attendant who had attempted to resuscitate her, and the zombie infection spreads. The zombies infect the baseball team and other passengers, but baseball player Yong-guk, his girlfriend Jin-hee, and two other students escape by fleeing to a front car. News broadcasts report zombie outbreaks throughout cities in Korea. The train stops at Daejeon, which had reportedly been placed under military quarantine, but the station is seemingly deserted. However, when the passengers disembark, they discover that the military have all been zombified, and they attempt to return to the train. Zombies rabidly attack the train, causing Seong-kyeong, In-gil and the homeless man to retreat to the rear of the train and into a bathroom with Su-an. Realizing the dire situation they are in, the conductor restarts the train to head to Busan, where a successful quarantine zone has reportedly been established.

Seok-Woo is separated from Su-an in the rush to get back on the train from the military zombies. Sang-hwa then receives a call from his pregnant wife, who is stuck in the bathroom with Su-an and the others, unable to get past the zombies who are in the car with them. Seok-woo races with Sang-hwa and Yong-guk to rescue his daughter and the others before being chased back to the front of the train by the horde of infected passengers. They manage to reach the front train car, but Yon-suk and the passengers had sealed the car door before them, fearing infection. Yong-guk tries to break the front door open while Seok-Woo and Sang-hwa try to block the zombies from entering their cabin. However, Sang-hwa is bitten. He tells Seok-Woo to flee and asks him to take care of his wife Seong-kyeong as he begins to transform into a zombie. Just as Yong-guk and Seok-Woo force the door open, In-gil sacrifices herself to buy the others' time to escape to the safe cabin, disheartening her sister Jong-gil.

Outraged, Seok-woo punches Yon-suk for refusing them entry, as he believes Sang-hwa and In-gil's deaths could have been prevented. However, Yon-suk claims that Seok-woo is infected due to the splattered blood over his clothes. He and the other passengers fearfully demand the escapees to isolate themselves in another part of the car. Jong-gil sees her zombified sister through the glass door, and realizes that she had willingly sacrificed her own life for the sake of others. She angrily denounces the selfishness of the other passengers in the car. She thanks her sister and opens the door, letting the zombies rush in and kill the passengers in the car, except for Yon-suk and an attendant, who take shelter in one of the restrooms. Later on, Seok-woo gets a call from his employee; he states that Busan is safe, and their military's defense proved successful, but one of their projects claimed responsible for the outbreak.

Due to a train wreck blocking their track at East Daegu train station, the remaining survivors are forced to stop. As they try to find another train, they are attacked and separated. Yon-Suk throws the train attendant to the zombies to escape. He also then throws Jin-hee into a zombie to save himself. Despondent, Yong-guk tries to comfort the infected Jin-hee, but she bites him after she turns. The conductor finds and activates a locomotive on another track, and then attempts to save Yon-suk from the zombies. However, Yon-suk, having already been bitten by a zombie, runs ahead to the locomotive, leaving the conductor to be consumed. After the homeless man sacrifices his life to defend the others from the zombies, Seok-woo, Su-an and Seong-kyeong successfully board the locomotive. However, they find Yon-suk in the engine room, on the verge of turning. Seok-woo fights off the zombified Yon-suk, but he is bitten before he throws Yon-suk off the train.

Not wanting to hurt the others, Seok-woo tells Seong-kyeong and Su-an that he needs to let himself go. He asks Seong-kyeong to take care of his daughter, but before killing himself, a sudden flashback appears, remembering the birth of her daughter, then commits suicide sadly and smilingly, by falling off the train, breaking his neck by one of the rails offscreen before he is fully transformed. Later, Seong-kyeong and Su-an stop at the blocked tunnel leading to Busan and walk through it. At the exit, soldiers spot the two of them in the tunnel. Because the soldiers cannot confirm they are not zombies in the darkness, their commander orders them to shoot. As the soldiers prepare to fire, one of them hears a child singing a song, thus proving that they are survivors, not zombies. They rush to the rescue while Su-an tearfully sings as the screen cuts to black.

Cast

 * Gong Yoo as Seok-woo
 * Ma Dong-seok as Sang-hwa
 * Jung Yu-mi as Seong-kyeong
 * Kim Su-an as Soo-an
 * Kim Eui-sung as Yong-suk
 * Choi Woo-shik as Young-gook
 * Ahn So-hee as Jin-hee
 * Choi Gwi-hwa as the homeless man
 * Jung Suk-yong as Captain of KTX
 * Ye Soo-jung as In-gil
 * Park Myung-sin as Jong-gil
 * Jang Hyuk-jin as Ki-chul
 * Kim Chang-hwan as Kim Jin-mo
 * Shim Eun-kyung as Runaway Girl

Box office
As of September 15, 2016, Train to Busan has grossed $99 million worldwide. It became the highest-grossing Korean film in Malaysia ($4.84 million), Hong Kong ($8.52 million), and Singapore ($3.1 million).

Reviews
Train to Busan has received generally positive reviews. Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a 94% approval rating based on 33 collected reviews, with an average rating of 7.2 out of 10; its consensus reads: "Train to Busan delivers a thrillingly unique – and purely entertaining –  take on the zombie genre, with fully realized characters and plenty of social commentary to underscore the bursts of skillfully staged action". Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, gives the film an average score of 73 based on 12 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Clark Collis of Entertainment Weekly writes that the film "borrows heavily from World War Z in its depiction of the fast-moving undead masses while also boasting an emotional core the Brad Pitt-starring extravaganza often lacked," adding that "the result is first-class throughout." The film receives a coveted "The New York Times Critics' Pick" badge, with reviewer Jeannette Catsoulis taking notice of the film's subtle class warfare.

In contrast, the negative reviews have described the film as "Snowpiercer with zombies." David Ehrlich of IndieWire comments that "as the characters whittle away into archetypes (and start making senseless decisions), the spectacle also sheds its unique personality." Kevin Jagernauth of The Playlist writes: "(Train to Busan) doesn’t add anything significant to the zombie genre, nor has anything perceptive to say about humanity in the face of crisis. Sure, it lacks brains, and that’s the easy quip to make, but what Train To Busan truly needs, and disappointingly lacks, is heart."