Yeon Sang-ho
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Following a former army captain and a small family surviving in Incheon, Peninsula combines components from I Am Legend , Mad Max , and the Fast & Furious series for a nonsensical joy ride that, while entertaining, lacks the sharpness of its predecessor.
Much more in the adrenaline-fueled, post-apocalyptic vein of Mad Max than your average zombie film, it’s a solid sequel to the original, albeit lacking the earlier film’s emotional heft.
At times it recalls two different “Mad Max” films (“The Road Warrior” and “Fury Road”), George A. Romero’s zombie sequel “Land of the Dead,” and, refreshingly, the “Fast & Furious” movies.
A handful of refugees return to the port city of Incheon on a ridiculous mission and discover survivors who've eked out an existence reminiscent of "Mad Max" meets "Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift."
Luckily Jung-seok is saved by a nice gang of survivors (complete with two cute kids), but Chul-min is grabbed by a sub-military mob of nasties who force him to outrun attacking zoms in a sort of Mad Max: Beyond Zombiedome , and later hit the road in a flotilla of cars stolen red-handed from every Mad Max movie, from the 1979 original to 2015’s Fury Road .
The elaborate Mad Max-like nighttime vehicular chase sequence through the ruined city comes to mind.
Escape from New York (1981)
Directed by John Carpenter
influenced Peninsula (2020)
Plot Themes Visuals
With a premise reminiscent of John Carpenter’s Escape From New York, Yeon and co-writer Park Joo-Suk make the ruins of a South Korean metropolis into a playground for American action-movie tropes and allusions.
With a set-up that feels inspired by John Carpenter’s Escape From New York and Neil Marshall’s Doomsday , crossed with a gritty heist flick, Peninsula already has the makings of something special.
Before that, most of the movie is devoted to lame dialogue scenes between kooky characters in cramped ruins who just want to find a way out of this story altogether; Yeon’s take on the genre might be inspired by the horde mentality of “World War Z” and its rotting waves of the undead, but “Peninsula” itself owes more to DIY post-apocalyptic visions like “Escape from New York” and “The Road Warrior.”
But in the hands of someone like Yeon, whose influences range from John Carpenter (“Escape from New York”) to George Miller (yes, “Mad Max: Fury Road”), it is the horror gift that just keeps giving.
With its bigger budget and wider scope but less gripping story, “Peninsula” is much more of a generic, CGI-reliant action movie that often feels like a video game coupled with a few pages ripped from the scripts of “Mad Max” and “Escape From New York.”
Sang-ho Yeon’s sequel, “Peninsula,” is a zombie movie riff on “The Road Warrior” with bits of “Escape from New York” splashed on top.
These include an extraordinary car chase as Yeon goes full throttle on the Seoul roads in a way that’s reminiscent of sequences from Mad Max: Fury Road .
Some take place during high-octane car chases that seem inspired by the narrow escapes of The Bourne Identity, the eye-popping drifts of The Fast And The Furious franchise and the over-the-top vehicle battles of Mad Max: Fury Road.
The epic 20-minute climax clearly takes some inspiration from Mad Max: Fury Road .
But in the hands of someone like Yeon, whose influences range from John Carpenter (“Escape from New York”) to George Miller (yes, “Mad Max: Fury Road”), it is the horror gift that just keeps giving.
A few cups of Escape from New York here, a few tablespoons of Mad Max: Fury Road there, blended with Zack Snyder, George Romero, pieces of any post-apocalyptic films from the past 20 years.
But for all its cartoony gore and gaudy imagery, Peninsula does at least fulfill its goal of being Mad Max: Fury Road with zombies.
Snowpiercer (2013)
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
influenced Train to Busan (2016), Peninsula (2020)
Plot Themes Visuals
MONTREAL — In what will undoubtedly be called “Snowpiercer”-with-zombies in countless reviews (well, including this one), director Sang-ho Yeon’s “Train To Busan,” making its North American premiere at Fantasia Film Festival, has a hook that sells the sizzle in a few short words: On a train hurtling across South Korea, passengers must fight to survive against horde of zombies.
As an allegory of class rebellion and moral polarization, it proves just as biting as Bong Joon-ho’s sci-fi dystopia “Snowpiercer,” while delivering even more unpretentious fun.
Equal parts “Snowpiercer” and “World War Z,” the film introduces itself as the rare pastiche with enough personality to feel like something new.
(If you’re looking for that, there’s always Snowpiercer.)
The bullet train environment is the major selling point for Train to Busan, and like Snowpiercer, the film wrings out much of its momentum from a sense of visual progression.
There are echoes of Snowpiercer in the film’s depiction of societal collapse.
World War Z (2013)
Directed by Marc Forster
influenced Train to Busan (2016), Peninsula (2020)
Themes Plot Visuals
But writer-director Yeon Sang-ho, making his live-action debut after a number of animated features (“The King of Pigs,” “The Fake”), has seen the same films and TV shows you’ve seen — “28 Days Later,” “World War Z,” “The Walking Dead” — and he’s out to do something different with the genre.
In many ways, it’s what “ World War Z ” should have been—a nightmarish vision of the end of the world, and a provocation to ask ourselves what it is that really makes us human in the first place.
Equal parts “Snowpiercer” and “World War Z,” the film introduces itself as the rare pastiche with enough personality to feel like something new.
The movie that “World War Z” should have been, “Train to Busan” has everything.
That’s a saving grace, especially as the zombies start swarming en masse and dominate the frame a la World War Z.
Train to Busan does a hypnotic job with its zombie effects, which owe a debt to the floodlike spilling-over aesthetic of World War Z.
Train to Busan gave the genre more heart than any film to date.
Stories like The Last of Us, Train to Busan, and even The Walking Dead video game.
The Walking Dead set the standard, and many other titles refined it, like The Girl with All the Gifts, Kingdom, and Train to Busan.
While the director has repeatedly distanced 28 Days Later from the “zombie” label, his exciting new “rage virus” installment is in a league not just with his own earlier film but other genre standouts like Romero’s Dawn of the Dead and Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan.
Night of the Living Dead (1968)
Directed by George A. Romero
influenced Train to Busan (2016), Peninsula (2020)
Themes Characters
Starting with George A. Romero, the filmmaker who invented the flesh-eating monster genre with 1968’s “Night of the Living Dead,” zombie movies often double as social allegories for the era in which they are made.
Owing a lot to “Night of the Living Dead” and “28 Days Later,” Yeon Sang-ho’s horror thriller is a masterful zombie film that succeeds in injecting pure terror in to the sprinting zombie once again.
Indeed, as all the best monster movies and undead efforts such as Frankenstein and Night of the Living Dead have previously emphasised, pondering the concept of culpability is as compelling as charting causality, consequences, and the usual narrative mechanics.
Almost 60 years since George A Romero’s Night of the Living Dead made its bow, and some seven seasons deep into The Walking Dead, one would imagine that the zombie apocalypse sub-genre is surely running out of fresh brains.
Sure, the movie borrows from tons of other films, notably Snowpiercer , made by another South Korean director, and there's even a nasty Karl Hardman-type businessman character (whose extreme selfishness leads to the deaths of others), borrowed from the original Night of the Living Dead .
Frankly, the world really didn’t need a sequel to this film, just like Night of the Living Dead never needed a follow up.
Following a former army captain and a small family surviving in Incheon, Peninsula combines components from I Am Legend , Mad Max , and the Fast & Furious series for a nonsensical joy ride that, while entertaining, lacks the sharpness of its predecessor.
At times it recalls two different “Mad Max” films (“The Road Warrior” and “Fury Road”), George A. Romero’s zombie sequel “Land of the Dead,” and, refreshingly, the “Fast & Furious” movies.
The older one drives like Vin Diesel in a Fast & Furious movie, while the younger one uses a light-filled remote control car to draw zombies away.
Sorry not sorry for the hyperbole, but Peninsula is Land Of The Dead , Mad Max: Fury Road , World War Z , all mixed in a blender with Fast & Furious franchise DNA (the later sequels).
Then there’s the Fury Road-inspired car chases through the streets of Incheon that feel like the natural next step for the Fast & Furious franchise (forget about going to space, Toretto and the family should fight a zombie outbreak next).
Where the first film was a character-driven horror drama that deftly threaded tension and thrills into its narrative at appropriate points, Peninsula is an action-horror sequel by way of World War Z or Fast & Furious, trading three-dimensional characters for more chaotic, wide-scale action that suffers from an overreliance on poorly realized CGI.
At times it recalls two different “Mad Max” films (“The Road Warrior” and “Fury Road”), George A. Romero’s zombie sequel “Land of the Dead,” and, refreshingly, the “Fast & Furious” movies.
Sorry not sorry for the hyperbole, but Peninsula is Land Of The Dead , Mad Max: Fury Road , World War Z , all mixed in a blender with Fast & Furious franchise DNA (the later sequels).
But the vibe here, executed with technical polish but with more lo-fi intimacy than the likes of World War Z, is actually closer to classic zombie fare, especially OG classics like George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978).
Though it borrows liberally and distractingly from many genre touchstones, the film that Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula most explicitly and inadvertently recalls is Speed 2: Cruise Control.
The zombie/train combo has actually been done before, notably in 1972’s Horror Express, but Train To Busan is considerably more propulsive and less narratively cluttered.
It doesn't take a hardcore horror fan to know what's coming next, though such fans will have seen it before, notably in the 1972 Peter Cushing-Christopher Lee film Horror Express.
Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985)
Directed by George Ogilvie
influenced Peninsula (2020)
Plot Characters
The other half is reminiscent of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome , as Chul-min is forced to participate in gladiatorial battles against the undead.
Lower your expectations and this zombie adventure tale by way of “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” AMC’s ‘The Walking Dead’ and countless videogames is entertaining enough, but its pretentious U.S. title of “Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula” promises more than it delivers.
It’s a staple archetype of power-mad, post-apocalypse military misogyny we’ve seen in the zombie genre a hundred times before, from Joseph Pilato’s tyrannical Captain Rhodes in Day of the Dead to Christopher Eccleston in 28 Days Later, but this time around there’s not even a basic attempt being made at a moral of man’s inhumanity to man—why bother, when you can start throwing prisoners into zombie pits to fight it out in the style of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?
Of course, there are sequels that are up to the standard set by their predecessors or are even better: “The Godfather: Part II,” “The Road Warrior,” “Aliens” and — within the world of movies about the undead — “Dawn of the Dead” — all come to mind.
Even at its most impressive, Sang-ho (co-writing with Ryu Yong-jae), a myriad of other films seem to have provided their impulses, from the return to a devastated zone as in Aliens (1986), an exiled territory from Carpenter’s Escape from New York (1981) or L.A. (1996), and especially the Mad Max universe.
Think of Peninsula as the Aliens or the 28 Weeks Later of the franchise and you won't go far wrong.
Director Yeon has to think of some reason why anyone would ever (ever!) go back (see also Aliens , The Descent 2 and so many other scary flicks), and here it’s all about money, with a decidedly shonky group looking to secretly send a bunch of mercenaries in to retrieve a truck carrying US$20 million (for some reason).
Yeon doesn’t dare to empathize with Jung-seok’s self-preserving instincts—his feral need to protect his own—as Steven Spielberg did in the similarly themed War of the Worlds .
With a set-up that feels inspired by John Carpenter’s Escape From New York and Neil Marshall’s Doomsday , crossed with a gritty heist flick, Peninsula already has the makings of something special.
Throughout, one gets a sense that the animated-minded Yeon wanted to fully blend that ever-present Akira influence with the later Romero films, specifically Day of the Dead .
It’s a staple archetype of power-mad, post-apocalypse military misogyny we’ve seen in the zombie genre a hundred times before, from Joseph Pilato’s tyrannical Captain Rhodes in Day of the Dead to Christopher Eccleston in 28 Days Later, but this time around there’s not even a basic attempt being made at a moral of man’s inhumanity to man—why bother, when you can start throwing prisoners into zombie pits to fight it out in the style of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome?
The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue (1974)
Directed by Jorge Grau
influenced Train to Busan (2016)
Plot
But whether it’s alleged prototype “Let Sleeping Corpses Lie” rip-off “A Monstrous Corpse” or the more recent “Zombie School” (2014), they’ve all been slapdash and unoriginal.
Given the influx of zombie films released in recent years – such as Train to Busan , World War Z and The Girl With All The Gifts – they all offer a sense of excitement to emphasise the danger of the undead.
Similar to effects seen earlier this year in Yeon Sang-ho’s Colony…
If you saw “Colony” (2026), the way that the zombies work together required a hive mind to come up with counterintuitive ways of congregating and moving.