Peninsula 2020 is a 2020 South Korean action–horror film that tells a story of a soldier and his team battle hordes of post-apocalyptic zombies in the wastelands of the Korean Peninsula.
Peninsula Movie Cast
| Dong-Won Gang as Jung Suk | John D. Michaels as Evacuation Boat Captain |
| Lee Jung-hyun as Min Jung | Sang-ho Yeon Director |
| Re Lee as Jooni | Joo-Suk Park Screenwriter |
| Hae-hyo Kwon as Old man KIM | Sang-ho Yeon Screenwriter |
Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula 2020 Movie Review
Peninsula or Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula 2020 or whatever you wanna call it. This is a sequel to the incredibly successful and extremely good zombie film train to Busan. I loved that movie. It’s one of my favorite zombie films of all time. I think it’s excellent.
This movie takes place 4 years after the initial outbreak that was detailed in train to Busan and it follows a group of people who tried to infiltrate a highly infected area to steal $20000000 that’s hidden on a truck.
And once they get there, there’s a bunch of zombies as well as a faction of criminals that make their life a living hell.
Since the same filmmaker was coming back to direct this film but also co write it. I was really pumped to see it. I loved train to Busan. I think it’s really really damn good.
It’s one of my favorite Korean movies and so I was very disappointed when peninsula was not just mediocre. It’s actually kind of bad.
One of the reasons I love Korean film so much is that they feel so different from what we normally see out of Hollywood.
They don’t feel like they’re drenched in Hollywood cliches that we’re so used to seeing. And when it comes to peninsula, it feels like it’s I try hard Hollywood movie.
Train to Busan was such a smart film and it was a very subtle movie. Even in the initial outbreak. They did their best to not show you any zombies.
You just saw the young girl or her father witness something out of the corner of their eyes. Somebody running by the train window really quickly or a fire in a building lot I guess some of time to really should day.
You can kind of gloss over all of that and it built suspense really well. It made you feel like you were watching an outbreak happened and that was very unique for a zombie movie, seeing that initial spark.
This movie taking place 4 years after that makes it feel like just about any other post apocalyptic zombie outbreak film or video game especially like last of us.
The production and set design looks exactly like the last of us. Cars on the road, overgrown weeds and grass, people piling out of buildings. it feels like something we’ve seen 1000 times. The originality of the first film has been stripped away.
One of the other issues about this movie is the characters. There’s nothing terribly wrong with any of them. They’re just very bland and uninteresting.
You can’t really feel that invested in what they’re trying to do. Because in the first movie you have a father who’s trying to get his daughter home to a mother’s that might be dead, but they don’t have confirmation and that’s really really great.
And this movie there just after some money in a truck. There’s even a point in the movie where someone who is important to our protagonist is actually taken captive by that faction of criminals but our protagonist has no idea just thinks he’s dead.
Where this movie really fails though is the CGI. This is a very digital fake looking movie especially car chases. There’s fully digital car chases throughout this entire movie. Cars break really faster or crash through, walls fall off of bridges.
There’s very simple shots of cars just going down the street. That are fully CG I rendered and I really didn’t understand why. It’s very noticeable. Every single time it takes you completely out of the experience. I felt like I was looking at a PC game from 2008 and I know that’s a very common critique for bad CG I in movies.
They look like a PC gamer 2008. I don’t know what else I can say. They refer to them as because this time around and they’re very tension less. They sort of just pile in front of cars and get smacked around by CGI trucks.
But at the very least the film is not a carbon copy of the first. It is a sequel that goes in a completely different direction with brand new characters and doesn’t try to emulate the first movie.
If it had succeeded that would have been really impressive and the other plus is that it doesn’t really affect the first movie at all in that regard. Because it takes place 4 years later with different characters and so you can still watch the first film and not feel like this movie rooms it.
The one thing this movie ruins is very early on, they say that the idea of Busan being a hopeful place didn’t really last and so it kind of makes you feel bad about certain things that happen in the first film you’re like.
I mean that’s about the only thing that I think it does that tarnishes the first movie. But back to those zombies, one of the things the first film did so well with the claustrophobia. The environment and the fact that there was really no place to escape to your kind of trap with these things.
In this movie, there tension less balloon people like the agent smiths and matrix reloaded just getting smacked all over the place flapping in the wind.
And it certainly doesn’t help in all these fake C. G. I. cars are slapping these things everywhere and they’re flying left and right. This is some vigilante 8 looking shit right here I don’t even know what the hell they were thinking.
But what do I really think, you can tell I was very disappointed by this movie and I was surprised. Since the same person directed and co-wrote it just as last time. I really don’t know. I feel like he misunderstood what he had. The first time around.
I think that he just. I don’t know it seems like he was trying to make a Hollywood movie or something and that’s really not what made the first film so great. This movie look like the zombie furious Busan draft 7.
I’m gonna give Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula 2020 movie a C-minus. Damn this could have been good. It happens. It’s a movie. I look forward to seeing what else he does in the future.
Guys thank you so much as always for reading my reviews. see you next time with another one.
