Peninsula (2020)

December 31, 2020 12:26 PM

A soldier and his team battle hordes of post-apocalyptic zombies in the wastelands of the Korean Peninsula. The sequel to 2016's Train to Busan.

Available for digital rental on various outlets.

posted by DirtyOldTown (5 comments total)

This is entertaining, but the expanded world and scope leads the film a bit away from the melodramatic heart of the original. The original was so compelling because at its core, it combined brutal zombie horror with Korean family melodrama.

(As an aside, I love melodrama and I find the contempt for it in the US to be pretty transparently tied to misogyny and toxic masculinity, though that is a rant for another day.)

This one opens things up to a John Carpenter-esque destroyed cityscape of cutthroat survivors kinda deal. It's still extremely action-packed and ceaselessly well-made. But the emotional core isn't as simple and visceral as the first one (which can accurately be summarized as "I'll do anything to save my child, even if 'anything' ends up being 'defeat a zombie horde in a confined space.'"

The action sequences here are super cool though.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:45 PM on December 31, 2020 [1 favorite]

All of this said, "Will the family be okay?" continues to be a more satisfying plot engine than "Will the badass come out on top?" or "Will man's inhumanity to man make survival from zombies pointless?"
posted by DirtyOldTown at 2:56 PM on December 31, 2020 [4 favorites]

i hadn't known there was a sequel to the best zombie movie ever. thx!
posted by j_curiouser at 6:49 AM on January 1, 2021

We saw it a few months ago in the cinema, and while we loved the first one, we found this totally underwhelming. Perhaps it's an artefact of seeing it on a big screen, but the CGI of the chase sequences in particular made it look more like a video game than a real movie, and maybe that's the best way to think about it.
posted by daveje at 2:37 AM on January 2, 2021

Just watching this now on Shudder. Not nearly as scary as Train, but it certainly has its moments. I have to admit that I laughed at the "Actually, North Korea did really well" part of the early news roundup, with footage of (presumably) North Korean missile batteries opening up on some unseen target.

Yes, just like the paranoid neighbor who turns out to be right about a Man in Black, North Korea turned out to be right about being invaded by South Korea. I'm sure they expected the South Koreans to be alive and carrying weapons, but a mortar barrage is a mortar barrage (not to mention that China would be more than happy to ship ammo to the North if it meant no zombies in China itself) and 70 years of preparation finally paid off.
posted by Mogur at 11:15 AM on November 2, 2021 [1 favorite]