a review of 首尔站

HOOPTOBER NIGHT SIX: This one didn't necessarily need to be explicitly connected to Train To Busan, but I appreciate the conceptual continuity anyway. The thing that TTB got so right about the zombie genre is that these movies work\ best as critiques of contemporary society, which it showed in the tension between the various social groups on the train. This movie continues that thread by specifically centering itself around a group of homeless and marginal people in the streets of Seoul, where the country's social and economic inequality is perhaps the most pronounced, and it touches on some real issues like human trafficking, militarized policing, and housing gentrification. There's a turn about 4/5 of the way through the movie that I honestly did not see coming, and the ending is quite a bit more bleak than TTB's, but I feel it was just as earned. I think my only real complaints about the film had to do with pacing -- at times, the movie takes a little bit too long to get us from point A to point B, and the zombie infestation is a much slower burn than in TTB, taking more than half the movie to really get going. The CGI animation, although quite good most of the time, occasionally feels noticeably puppetlike, a la lower-budget TV animation or a video game cut scene. But these are minor quibbles with an otherwise excellent movie that mostly lives up to its predecessor.