Peninsula (2020)
Directed by Yeon Sang-ho
A soldier and his team battle hordes of post-apocalyptic zombies in the wastelands of the Korean Peninsula.
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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.
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.
Then something like the new Train to Busan sequel, Peninsula , comes along and offers a reminder that in the right hands, the genre still has plenty of chomp left.
Yeon Sang-ho ups the ante and moves the action forward from 2016’s Train To Busan to a post-apocalyptic and quarantined Korean peninsula which has been ravaged by the zombie outbreak.
South Korea managed the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic unusually well, which is basically the opposite of how Yeon Sang-ho’s 2016 “Train to Busan” predicted the country might react to such a disaster.
Heck, The Walking Dead , once the hottest thing on TV, now elicits about as much excitement as an episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Yeon Sang-ho was able to not only revive the zombie flick with his 2016 South Korean wonder Train to Busan , he downright made it feel new and vital again.
Cowriter (with his "Train to Busan" partner Joo-Suk Park)/director Sang-ho Yeon, who began his zombie run with his animated “Seoul Station” before moving to live action with “Train to Busan,” one of the best examples of this horror subgenre, disappoints with a sequel that is more genre rehash than revelation.
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Unfortunately, attempts at bigger-picture social commentary in the script by Yeon and Ryu Yong-jae fall short of the bar set by both 2016’s excellent “Train to Busan” and the sublimely nuanced “Seoul Station,” the feature-length animated prequel Yeon made in the same year.
Cowriter (with his "Train to Busan" partner Joo-Suk Park)/director Sang-ho Yeon, who began his zombie run with his animated “Seoul Station” before moving to live action with “Train to Busan,” one of the best examples of this horror subgenre, disappoints with a sequel that is more genre rehash than revelation.
Once again directed and co-written by Sang-ho Yeon, whose 2016 animated film “Seoul Station” is a prequel to “Train to Busan,” “Peninsula” picks up when a family in a car are too traumatized to stop for another family, whose car is broken down in the road.
Barreling onto the scene like, well, a runaway train, South Korean writer/director Yeon Sang-ho seized the world’s attention in 2016 with the one-two punch of Train to Busan and its animated prequel, Seoul Station.
Peninsula is the third zombie film from writer/director Yeon Sang-ho, along with animated prequel Seoul Station and 2016’s Train to Busan.
Now well established in Yeon’s Train To Busan and his prior animation Seoul Station, the zombie outbreak has engulfed the nation in Peninsula.
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.”
Occasionally, the filmmaker uses CGI to suggest nightmarish “World War Z”-like torrents of them, adding to the film’s entertaining, if also derivative vibe.
With a bigger budget and wider lens, but a less fulfilling narrative, “Peninsula” is exactly the type of zombie flick that “Busan” was trying to combat: a movie filled with hordes of CGI zombies that plays more like a quick game of “Left for Dead” or a knockoff of “World War Z” than an inspired sequel.
During the 20-minute chase from the center of town to the port of Incheon, they swarm as they did in “World War Z,” like so many CG lemmings, plunging from bridges and ambling into the roadway.
While the human threat poses a potentially greater danger than the zombies, Peninsula still features a whole mess of the undead, flowing like tidal wave of gore, similar to the first film or to World War Z .
The clumsy CGI takes a page from the “World War Z” playbook, with zombies piling upon themselves to become even more menacing.
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).
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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 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?