Peninsula (2020): Post-apocalyptic Zombie Action

A thrilling movie experience if you can overlook the writing.

Between Seoul Station and Train to Busan, I got into Peninsula hoping for Train to Busan but amped up two fold or three fold. Instead what I got was a very nice zombie movie but — it reminds me a lot of how I ordered shrimp combo dish at the local Mexican restaurant the other night, but they misheard me and gave me a beef chili combo.

I enjoyed the beef chili combo anyways and I’ll still order from them, but even if I really enjoyed the beef chili combo, that doesn’t change the reality that I asked for a shrimp combo — like this movie is not what I expected a sequel to Train to Busan to be.

Though there are no overlapping characters or locations, Peninsula is a story that probably starts in the same time of Train to Busan, and then it fast forwards to four years later where a four person team sneaks back into the country that was once their home to smuggle out a huge sum of money.

To be fair, nowhere on the promo poster does the movie claim to be Train to Busan 2, so I was willing to overlook that.

What I couldn’t overlook though — and this bothered me for the remainder of the time I watched Peninsula — was that it didn’t make sense that the four went back into Korea.

In the movie, after the zombie apocalypse in the Republic of Korea, citizens from the Republic of Korea are in the surrounding Asian countries as refugees. The four are refugees that are living in Hong Kong when they’re approached by a white man to smuggle out 10 million dollars sitting in a truck out of the quarantine zone, which is the entire territory of the Republic of Korea.

As a reward, the man *promises* to let the crew of four have half of the recovered money so that each of them would receive 1.25 million dollars.

And they just agree to go, just like that.

I was at a loss for words, because even if they were refugees, and even if they were very poor, and even if they had no motivation to stay, I couldn’t understand that the four could not see that there was no guarantee that the man would uphold his end of the promise and actually give them half of the money they recover.

This was obviously a lie, and the characters never touch on what they would do to ensure they truly got half of the money as promised.

So most of the movie, I wondered why they went into the quarantine zone when they should be aware that there’s no they would be leaving there alive with the money.

I think with a little change in the writing, the first 20 minutes of the movie could be saved. For example, Don-won Kang’s character Jeong-seok or his brother-in-law Cheol-min could have been co-owners of an underground company that specializes in recovering lost goods from the quarantine zone, and the taxi driver and the other stranger could be clients asking the two to help them recover research documents from the quarantine zone that were authored by the biochemical company responsible for the outbreak.

But it could be that actually Cheol-min and Jeong-suk have a deathwish, and the taxi-driver actually only came along because she alone was aware that there would be a lot money hidden alongside the research documents. Or maybe she knew that her sister or mother or children were surviving in the quarantine zone, and she wants to smuggle them out.

I think Peninsula only works if the people going into the quarantine zone have their own motivations to go in there, instead of an obviously fake promise from a guy they just met that they would get half of his money.

Besides this distraction, personally I was very distracted by Dong-won Kang being the main character because he plays an incredibly beautiful antagonist in Kundo (2014), which is one of my favorite movies.

Speaking of movie stars, I think it could have been fun to see Dong-seok Ma, Yoo Gong, or Sohee show up as prominant zombies somewhere in the film to cement that Peninsula is happening in the same world as Train to Busan.

The movie is post-apocalyptic. There are zombies. There are car chases. There are girls and women with agendas as characters. But is it a sequel to Train to Busan? No. Does it remind you of Train to Busan? No. It reminds me of Mad Max. Because though there’s zombies in there, this is a post-apocalyptic story.