It’s time for another Kpopalypse film review! This time we’re taking a look at the film “Peninsula”, the sequel to “Train To Busan”!
“Where’s the Kpopalypse review of Squid Game 3? Where’s the Kpopalypse review of K-pop Demon Hunters?” I hear you all ask. Sorry, but that shit has to wait, I’ll get to it in due course. A kind caonima gave me a copy of Peninsula for review purposes literally years ago and I’ve been sitting on it ever since because I wanted to watch it with my girlfriend as she’s a big horror movie fan but the right time to do so just kept not coming up. I promised my reader who sent me this as well as other readers who have been keenly waiting for this review that I would review Peninsula first before I did any more movie or TV reviews, so here it is. Let’s take a look and see if this film meets required standards!
Released: 2020
Running time: 116 minutes
IMDB entry
I reviewed the original Train To Busan back in my “International Women’s Day – Sohee Edition” film review post. That film featured Ahn Sohee, once member of Wonder Girls, but as people who have watched that film will know (spoilers… or not really if you know how horror films go) she didn’t make it to the end of that story due to being a bit-character who gets chomped down on by zombies, so she’s not in this one at all. So what’s the k-pop connection in this sequel? It turns out that one of the main characters is none other than first-generation k-pop solo singer Lee Jung Hyun. People might remember her old songs like “Wa“, or “Nuh/You“, the latter of which got on my best of the dark ages list. More recent k-pop fans might know her later songs such as 2011’s “Suspicious Man” or 2013’s “V“, songs which have aged pretty well. So that’s what makes the sequel as relevant to the world of Kpopalypse as the first film.
Plot synopsis: “Peninsula” was released in 2020 whereas the original “Train To Busan” came out in 2016. The film synchronises with this timeline by picking up the story of our main character Jungseok (Gang Dongwon) four years later (after a short but excellent introduction), where he escapes now zombie-infested Korea and is living in Hong Kong. He gets recruited by some Chinese gangsters to risk his life to go back to Incheon and return with some money they left over there in a truck and split the proceeds, and of course he totally agrees to this deal because he likes money more than not being around zombies for some reason plus we wouldn’t have a story otherwise. Of course, things get complicated: what he thought was a city full of only zombies also contains several survivors, including a gang of psychotic Mad-Max-villain style rogue militia living in a compound, as well as Minjung (Lee Jung Hyun) and her family who have managed to survive just by having kids who are really good at stunt driving and presumably not having their address on Google Maps. Horror afficionados at this point might be thinking “gosh, this story sounds like it’s heading into territory a bit like George A. Romero’s ‘Land Of The Dead’, this couldn’t be just a carbon copy of that film could it?” The films aren’t the same to the point where I’d call this a remake, but they are still fairly similar in terms of their general story setup. I won’t go further into plot details here to prevent spoilers, but then I don’t think I really need to, you can probably figure out the rest of the story yourself without even watching it and if you’ve seen more than one action/horror movie in your life you’d probably be at least 80% accurate.
Appeal to average filmgoers: You’ve probably already guessed the first problem with this film, which is that the plot is very predictable. Once it’s clearly established who the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are, which takes about the first forty minutes, we’re into some pretty specific plot arcs which you’ve seen dozens of times before in all sorts of films like this. It’s a shame because Train To Busan had a genuinely unique story and many unexpected moments, Peninsula doesn’t have anything like this (except maybe one specific scene which is actually spoilered in the trailer I’ve linked below). The tone of the two films is also very different, as Train To Busan had somewhat of a “realistic” edge to the horror action, whereas Peninsula (despite how the trailer looks) is very much more styled like a traditional action movie, with flashy, shallow action movie cliches to match. Cue heroes who never miss shots except when the plot calls for it, villains who never hit shots except when the plot calls for it, cars that do crazy stunts but never seem to get all that dented up, and plenty of annoyingly trite moments. You’ll quickly groan as “good” characters take time out from urgently running away from dangerous situations to hug or have an emotional moment together, “bad” characters do random “bad” things for no reason other than “they’re crazy, man”, and things just generally play out in ways that will make you groan. The fact that this film pulls out the tiresome “I know that’s my loved one who just became a zombie and I’m totally aware of what a zombie is and that they’ve become one because I’ve seen the zombie transformation process dozens of times before because I’m a long-established character, but I’m not going to run away from them and save my life because I’m a stupid dumb bitch, I think I’ll go treat them as if they’re still human instead because my fragile mind can’t cope” cliche within the first few minutes tells you everything you need to know about the writing.
The biggest problem in any horror film is when it’s actually really hard to give a single fuck about anyone in it, and that’s definitely the case here. Characters will die and you just won’t give a damn because this film doesn’t give those characters believable character-building scenes that make you give a crap about what might happen to them. The only exception; the remote-control-car-driving younger daughter of Minjung’s family, she’s quite cool and likeable. The rest of them can get eaten by zombies all day, I couldn’t care less. The ending in particular absolutely sucks, dragging on far too long with pauses for sappy heartstring-tugging bullshit that completely falls flat because you’re not invested enough in the characters by this point to even care whether they die or not, as long as they just get on with it. In fact if the film has one big glaring weakness, it’s that the zombies don’t really get enough screentime or gravity in the plot, for large stretches of the movie they’re shunted to the background and barely seem like a concern at all to the main characters who are all armed to the teeth… which might arguably be “realistic” because how else would they have survived, but it’s really not what you want from a “horror” film where the zombies are supposed to actually matter.
Having said that, damn the film at least sure looks great. Some slightly-too-weightless CGI car chase maneuvers aside, they absolutely nailed the dark post-apocalyptic Seoul look. Buildings are trashed and overgrown with vegetation convincingly, streets are littered with car wrecks (although these do seem to mysteriously clear to the outer lanes whenever the director decides a car chase scene needs to happen) and most importantly, characters look appropriately dishevelled and scarred. There’s no primped to perfection spotless men and women running around with perfect hair and makeup in the apocalypse like there is too many times in Hollywood movies… well, not too much, anyway. It’s great to see such attention to detail given to the visual design, if you’re heavily into visual effects and the cinematography of horror, this film is probably worth a look just for that reason alone. Its definitely the best thing about it and the zombies still look as good as they did in the first film.
Appeal to k-pop fans: The general “de-glam” look of the movie definitely extends to our sole k-popper Lee Jung Hyun, who looks almost unrecognisable as her former idol self here. Given that the visuals are just so damn on point in this film, there’s not much k-pop glam to be found. The closest the film probably comes to something approaching glitz and glamour is a scene where a soju poster displaying a bikini-clad woman on a wall in the bad guys’ compound is prominently shown. My girlfriend actually asked me “is that a k-pop idol?” but of course it wasn’t – readers of this website will know all too well how much the women in k-pop get severely punished for looking even remotely busty and thicc enough to be hung up and lusted after inside bad guy’s compounds.
Appeal to Lee Jung Hyun fappers: Did I mention that Lee Jung Hyun’s songs have aged quite finely? Well, so has she. My girlfriend guessed her age (correctly) as “in her forties, because Asian women always look ten years younger than they actually are”, so you know she’s looking pretty good here… all while keeping up the realistically postapocalyptic vibes, too. Honestly she looks better in this film than she ever has in her own music videos:
Americans in particular will be in heaven because Lee Jung Hyun gets a decent chunk of action screen time and presents all the gun-toting “I’m not afraid of zombies or anyone really I’m too busy kicking ass” sex appeal that your broken culture demands. Desperate right-wing incel losers searching vainly for faps in the Korean media content desert won’t have to lamely photoshop machine guns into her hands in fan photos like they have to do with all their other k-pop faves because it’s all right here. Your bias could never. It’s just a pity that having the main female protagonist (and her kids even more so) being so kick-ass and kind of afraid of nothing seriously undercuts the whole “horror” vibes of the movie… if the main characters don’t find the zombies all that concerning, why should you?
Conclusion: The best thing about this film is actually the first ten minutes of introduction which is in Korea and wraps up the main character’s escape overseas. There’s some eye-poppingly violent scenes, the zombies actually feel like a genuine threat here, and overall it has very similar vibes to the first film. The initial touching down back in Korea to retrieve the money is also full of tension while we wait for the zombie horde to inevitably discover our group of money scouts. However the film starts to really fall apart once the characters are fully established and we realise that we’re not really in a horror film anymore, but a Hollywood action “Land Of The Dead meets Mad Max” style adventure that just uses the setting of Train To Busan as a veneer for some pretty typical action movie type stuff. It’s certainly not an awful film, if you like a dark action/adventure I guess it delivers on that and I’d probably still take it over the Hollywood version of the same thing, but it certainly does not reach the high bar set by the first film, and doesn’t even feel that much like a sequel at all especially once you get past the first hour. It feels to me like the film’s director made the same mistake that most of the main characters do – too concerned about the money, not concerned enough about the zombies.
Final score: 2.5 soju posters out of 5, but add an extra half a soju poster if you’ve been trying to use Photoshop to get the M16 to sit in Wonyoung’s hands naturally for the last two hours and you still can’t get it to look quite realistic enough to post on your social media page.
