Oh my God, what is this? Siti wrote twice in a span of two days. She never does that! I know, right? Well, tomorrow is a holiday in Singapore because it’s Singapore’s National Day! Yay! So, what shall one do on the eve of a public holiday? Watch a movie, of course! After the disappointment that is Suicide Squad, I seriously need a good movie to get back my $14.50 gone to waste on Sunday.

Train to Busan is my choice – Korea’s answer to Hollywood’s World War Z. How does it fare?

Train to Busan is literally any zombie movies out there – there’s a zombie outbreak that started small and then gradually went apocalyptic. Seok-Woo is a divorced father who neglected his daughter, Soo-An. When she insisted that he brought her to see his ex-wife in Busan, he reluctantly did so, travelling via the train. Unbeknownst to all the passengers and staff, an infected person ran into the train and turned into a zombie, killing one of the staff member and slowly created chaos in the train. Escaping to the only safe zone in South Korea turned into a survival for the passengers.

It is as nail-biting as the trailer makes it to be. As I mentioned earlier, it’s Korea’s answer to World War Z. It has some similarities with the Hollywood movie with the exception that the zombies are actually made of nightmares. They looked more like those ghosts you watched in Korea’s horror movies. Kudos to the makeup artists if I don’t sleep tonight, I guess (yay?). And that there is no known cure, the government here is portrayed to be a bunch of idiots who cannot be trusted, it happened within South Korea (and not globally) and in a train where you could get tips on how to escape from a mob of zombies in case it ever happened in real life whilst you are travelling in a train – a bat and a guy who’s probably a wrestler.

What both movies also have is the emotional value to it. For World War Z, Brad Pitt’s Gerry Lane, the hero finding the cause and cure for the zombie outbreak, left behind his wife and two kids to do so. Here, Seok-Woo braved the odds to save his daughter. There’s also the fact that there were three other secondary characters with loved ones in the train making this a quadruple whammy to the heart when some things went awry.

The movie kept you to the edge of your seat. The audience were all screaming and shouting half the time in the theatre (because goddammit, close the damn doors! Haven’t Panic! at the Disco taught us that?)

The acting was great all around by all the cast members. There was a moment in the movie, which felt really awkward coming from the child actor as it felt fake but it was okay afterwards.

Overall, this movie is great if you would like to not sleep at night. Full of action, drama and horror (a lot of jump-scares). I give this movie a 4 out of 5 (if they close the damn doors, it would save the audience from the sore throat that we will all inevitably get from shouting and receive a full marks from me – I was THAT frustrated.)

Trailer…