by Pa Rock
Adventurer
While I was still fairly new to the island of Okinawa back in 2010, two friends, Daniel and Kelly, and I decided to spend the long Thanksgiving Day weekend in South Korea. We stayed at a large U.S. military hotel in Seoul and used that as our base for exploring the capital. Our plans had included a trip to the Demilitarized Zone where we would have been afforded a soldier's view of North Korea, but the day before our visit there had been an "incident" with the North, and consequently the DMZ was closed to visitors for the next several days.
To fill the sudden void in our schedules, we booked a train trip to the bustling Korean city of Busan which is located along the coast of the Sea of Japan at the other side of the country from Seoul. Our travel to Busan was aboard a high-speed ("bullet") train that made the trip in just a couple of hours. While in Busan we took a bus tour of the city and then hailed a cab and visited the Hae Dong Yong Gung Buddhist Temple that is literally carved into the cliffs overlooking the sea. That temple is one of the most beautiful sights that I visited during the two years that I lived and worked in Asia.
This week while flipping through the Netflix offerings looking for a diversion, I came across a foreign film entitled "Train to Busan." Thinking back to the nice time that I had in Busan several years earlier, I decided to at least read up on this film. It was filmed in South Korea in 2016 and was already being hailed as a classic of the "zombie" genre. The two-hour movie, with English subtitles, told the story of several individuals struggling to go from Seoul to Busan aboard a high speed train that was being ravaged by zombies as it flew along the tracks.
I'm not a fan of zombies, especially since they took over the executive branch of our government, but I decided to watch "Train to Busan" anyway in hopes that I would see a few things that would remind me of that trip all those years ago. The first memory that was jogged was the train station in Seoul which was much as I remembered it. The railroad cars were also familiar, but that was about all. A zombie jumped onto the train just as the doors were closing and it was starting to move down the tracks - and from there on everything got loud and bloody!
Spoiler Alert: The movie train itself never arrived in Busan, so there no images of that bustling city or the serene seaside Buddhist temple. However I did read that "Train to Busan 2" is being filmed this year and hopefully it will address those omissions.
But back to the original . . .
While not a fan of zombie movies, I surprised myself by quickly becoming enthralled with this one. Everything was highly realistic, from zombies falling off of buildings and onto the tops of moving train cars - like so much meaty rain - to literally dozens of the walking dead pushing through plate glass windows like undulating masses of bloody flesh and then storming off in search of their next meals. Several of the characters were quite sympathetic, but most of them were eaten anyway.
It was an intense feast of blood and gore and violence that didn't let up until the very last minutes of the movie. My own train ride to Busan was, by comparison, very lackluster!
(Note: My trip to Busan is covered in this blog on November 26, 2010, in a post entitled "Busan by High Speed Rail.")
Adventurer
While I was still fairly new to the island of Okinawa back in 2010, two friends, Daniel and Kelly, and I decided to spend the long Thanksgiving Day weekend in South Korea. We stayed at a large U.S. military hotel in Seoul and used that as our base for exploring the capital. Our plans had included a trip to the Demilitarized Zone where we would have been afforded a soldier's view of North Korea, but the day before our visit there had been an "incident" with the North, and consequently the DMZ was closed to visitors for the next several days.
To fill the sudden void in our schedules, we booked a train trip to the bustling Korean city of Busan which is located along the coast of the Sea of Japan at the other side of the country from Seoul. Our travel to Busan was aboard a high-speed ("bullet") train that made the trip in just a couple of hours. While in Busan we took a bus tour of the city and then hailed a cab and visited the Hae Dong Yong Gung Buddhist Temple that is literally carved into the cliffs overlooking the sea. That temple is one of the most beautiful sights that I visited during the two years that I lived and worked in Asia.
This week while flipping through the Netflix offerings looking for a diversion, I came across a foreign film entitled "Train to Busan." Thinking back to the nice time that I had in Busan several years earlier, I decided to at least read up on this film. It was filmed in South Korea in 2016 and was already being hailed as a classic of the "zombie" genre. The two-hour movie, with English subtitles, told the story of several individuals struggling to go from Seoul to Busan aboard a high speed train that was being ravaged by zombies as it flew along the tracks.
I'm not a fan of zombies, especially since they took over the executive branch of our government, but I decided to watch "Train to Busan" anyway in hopes that I would see a few things that would remind me of that trip all those years ago. The first memory that was jogged was the train station in Seoul which was much as I remembered it. The railroad cars were also familiar, but that was about all. A zombie jumped onto the train just as the doors were closing and it was starting to move down the tracks - and from there on everything got loud and bloody!
Spoiler Alert: The movie train itself never arrived in Busan, so there no images of that bustling city or the serene seaside Buddhist temple. However I did read that "Train to Busan 2" is being filmed this year and hopefully it will address those omissions.
But back to the original . . .
While not a fan of zombie movies, I surprised myself by quickly becoming enthralled with this one. Everything was highly realistic, from zombies falling off of buildings and onto the tops of moving train cars - like so much meaty rain - to literally dozens of the walking dead pushing through plate glass windows like undulating masses of bloody flesh and then storming off in search of their next meals. Several of the characters were quite sympathetic, but most of them were eaten anyway.
It was an intense feast of blood and gore and violence that didn't let up until the very last minutes of the movie. My own train ride to Busan was, by comparison, very lackluster!
(Note: My trip to Busan is covered in this blog on November 26, 2010, in a post entitled "Busan by High Speed Rail.")
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