a review of 釜山行

HOOPTOBER XII NIGHT FOUR: My first rewatch of the challenge! Seeing this again really underlined a few things about it:

1. This is a rock-solid movie! Nothing here feels extraneous to the plot, all of the characters and their subplots feel properly capitalized upon; We feel bad when characters die for the sake of catharsis, but nobody's getting "thrown away" unnecessarily here, which is a problem for lot of these kinds of movies.
2. It feels like this was a major inflection point in the acceptance of Korean cinema (including K-drama TV) in the west, to the point that I kinda wonder if US audiences would have responded as strongly to PARASITE or SQUID GAME without this movie coming along. To be clear, Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook were already known quantities to cinephiles, with some crossover success to general audiences, but I feel like TRAIN TO BUSAN's word-of-mouth success on Netflix opened a lot of people up to Korean cinema who weren't on board before.
3. It's a real shame that the Marvel Cinematic Universe had no idea how to harness Don Lee's massive charisma and screen presence; The way he just sorta got dumped into ETERNALS and discarded two scenes later reminds me of how badly Marvel also fumbled the bag on Tadanobu Asano in the THOR movies.