Introduction: Serious Face Popular Science Zombie culture
originated from African voodoo culture. Zombies or zombies (of course, Western zombies different from Lin Zhengying's zombies) that have flourished from the Western big screen are in a typical subculture circle. Why did the zombie movie "Train to Busan" filmed in South Korea successfully attract the attention of all parties except Zombie and Zombie (the nickname given to themselves by zombie and zombie fans)?
In addition to the well-organized writing, good industrial standards, and the so-called humanistic thinking that is different from other zombie popcorn movies, there is also a sense of substitution of Asian images. If "Train to Busan" is regarded as a victory for the Korean genre, it has to be compared with "The Zombie Survival Guide" (Max Brooks, 2011), which is a classic of the dead silk world, and look at the Asian background The next time you shoot a Western-type film, you will learn, refer to, or change what.
Zombie Survival Guide
The idea of comparing "Train to Busan" and "Zombie Survival Guide" came from this shot. The protagonist Shi Yu happened to have a book in his hand, and the color looked similar to "Zombie Survival Guide". In an emergency, Shi Yu blocked it with knowledge. The mouth of the zombies also saved his own life. And "Zombie Survival Guide" is a book that teaches you how to survive in the zombie world. This book has rigorous scientific thinking, starting from the origin of zombies, fighting zombies, how to escape, how to survive, etc., not only for zombie culture lovers It has been widely circulated in China, and it has also become an important reference for the rationality principle of subsequent zombie films.
According to the research of the author Max Brooks, the source of the zombies is not the "black magic" of a primitive tribe in Africa, but a virus called Solanum. The scientific community defines a virus as a source of infection that can only replicate within a living host cell. Viruses cannot replicate themselves, but they can spread their genes in the host with the help of the host cell's replication system. Soranan is spread through blood flow, from where the virus enters to the brain. Once the virus spreads to the brain, it will cause the body to stop functioning, the heartbeat stops, and "death" is declared, but the brain is still in a dormant state of survival. As a result, Soranan transformed the human body into a new kind of creature with completely different functions, a tireless "living dead" that did not require oxygen.
It's not, but the binding is a lot like the Zombie Survival Guide
In addition to the virus infection mode and zombie action mode following the "Zombie Survival Guide", "Train to Busan" has set several features for zombies that are quite in line with the train scene. First of all, let's take a look at the description of the physical capabilities of zombies in the "Guide": A. Vision, the eyes of zombies are exactly the same as those of humans, and they can still receive visual signals when the degree of decay is not deep. There is no night vision, as zombies without eyes can track their prey. B. Hearing, zombies have super hearing ability, they can not only hear the sound but also distinguish the position. C. Smell, the undead have a sharper sense of smell and can even smell a fresh corpse from a mile away.
The zombies in "Train to Busan" lost their tracking ability in the dark, and the protagonist found that the zombies were only sensitive to sound at this time.
From this scene, we can clearly understand that the zombies on the express train to Busan can only see their prey in the presence of light, have super hearing, and have zero sense of smell. The first two are completely in line with the description of the "Guide", the third is completely reversed, and, as one of the most famous bloodthirsty creatures, zombies do not have any bloodlust in this film, and rely entirely on light and sound. It is also relatively arbitrary. As the plot progresses further, the audience will learn that the setting is all about serving the cramped carriages and tunnels on the road to Busan. If we explore these settings in the spirit of Brooks' proof, we should get the following conclusions.
The zombie outbreak in South Korea mainly uses the visual system to track the prey. The excellent auditory system is only auxiliary, and even becomes the Achilles heel in the absence of a light source. It can be guessed that the virus in this outbreak can quickly corrupt the olfactory system and the visual system. The rate of corruption is relatively slow. Light is a necessary condition for the operation of the human visual system. When the visual cells receive light stimulation, the optic nerve begins to excite. This virus should completely destroy the rod cells of zombies that sense dark light, and the cone cells that sense daylight are less affected. And the absence of an olfactory system allows humans to be in the same compartment as zombies, giving humans (on the train) the greatest possibility to overturn. After all, humans are a nighttime fragile creature (more on the inside).
As mentioned above, in the absence of a light source, excellent hearing can even become the Achilles heel of zombies. It can be assumed a scene. After dark, a large number of speakers are placed in the suburbs of the city. At a certain point in time, all the speakers play Rammstein of the Chariot Band at the same time. A black body rushed towards the sound source, and the dark night sky bloomed. Several sparks fell into the black tide, and immediately burned. If it's a little more romantic... also play Snow Patrol's Chasing Cars.
A detailed bug. The zombies in front of the three rescued in the picture above were rescued from the tunnel and then quickly turned to chase and kill the three; the rescued in the 13th carriage in the picture below, the zombies with their backs to humans could not feel the existence of humans of.
The story on the train began when the first man and the second man were separated from their relatives and friends, and the relatives and friends were separated by coincidence, so the rescue of the partnership became so logical, even if they were not pleasing to each other before. After a rational analysis of the characteristics of zombies, it is not difficult to come to the conclusion - find a bathroom or an empty carriage to sit quietly without making a sound, block the sight of the zombies, and you can reach Busan safely - this conclusion, but in this case, the audience sees It is a silent performance art.
After passing through this tunnel, Shi Yu realized that the tunnel was a turning point. Of course, it is also an important scene carefully designed by the director to control the rhythm of the film to create crisis and hope at the same time. The staggered light and shadow inside and outside the tunnel is similar to a game bridge: if the player needs to sneak into a building at night, there will be guards with flashlights or searchlights shining back and forth outside the building, and the patrolling route is fixed, so once the route is found Regularly, you can avoid the possibility of being illuminated by the light. The function of the tunnel is also the same, the rescue trio ("Guide" mentioned in the guide, avoid large groups when crossing the zombie territory, which will reduce the mobility of the group, and should also avoid fighting alone, the optimal number of people in a group is 3 people , this is the most suitable configuration for hand-to-hand combat) You can hide somewhere and wait for an opportunity, and once you enter the tunnel, you will start to hit the east and west to the No. 13 car. However, this involves a geographical problem. How many tunnels are there on this train line to Busan? Enough to rescue the trio through how many cars? You can even list a formula to calculate the speed of movement of humans and zombies. 1. Calculate the speed of movement of zombies and humans respectively. 2. During rescue, the speed of zombies moving in the opposite direction minus the forward moving speed of humans. How long does it take to reach the No. 13 carriage? 3. After the rescue is successful, how long does it take to reach the No. 15 compartment when the reverse movement speed of humans is reduced by the forward movement speed of zombies? ... that might be the case.
Although the Taiwanese translation of "Train to Busan" is "Corpse Speed Train", in fact, the fastest zombie speed recorded in the "Guide" is only 1.5 seconds per step, but the zombies on the screen obviously already have a "burst when they find their prey" general perception. Not counting the first tunnel where the breakthrough point was found, and the imprecise timing from the second tunnel after that, it took the trio to travel through a carriage for 2 minutes. In this carriage, the trio lost a mobile phone, so they were able to calculate the speed of the zombie outbreak. From the ringing of the mobile phone, it took 12 seconds for the zombies to travel from one end of the carriage to the other, and the length of a train carriage was about 26 meters. From this, it is calculated that the movement speed of the zombies when they erupt is 2.2m/s. Zombies have a single target, their physical speed is easy to grasp, and humans are complex. In addition to the simple movement speed, there are various emotional fetters such as fear, worry, urgency, and the cooperation of strategies and tactics. These are all reasonable factors that should be included in the action speed. Therefore, the speed of the trio was calculated to be 0.22m/s, one-tenth of the zombies in the burst state. As for formulas 2 and 3...Leave it to the audience with Brooks' rigorous scientific spirit.
Ringtones are also not chosen casually
After going through this carriage, the witty Shi Yu solved the geographic problem without needing geographic knowledge. He opened the map on his mobile phone and used modern technology to calculate the length and interval of each tunnel afterward, and learned that it would take two minutes to pass through the next tunnel. The third tunnel actually lasted 2 minutes and 58 seconds in the movie, which is a relatively good rhythm control. The audience should be familiar with the 10 seconds left in the crisis, which is always enough for 10 minutes to happen.
The two-minute tunnel actually traveled for 3 minutes after inaccurate timing. Didn't the big villain in the human race, Mr. Jin, told him to move forward at full speed?
When the trio who finally reunited with their relatives and friends fled to the 15th carriage, the villain, the pronoun of pure evil, Kim Executive Director stood up to block everyone, and took on the infamy of human selfishness. And the people who didn't stop him, aren't they all accomplices? The badness of this character was rudely revealed from the beginning of the film. Jin Changwu said to Shi Yu's daughter Xiu'an (a sentence that Chinese children should also be familiar with): "If you don't study hard, you will grow up just like him." Xiu'an replied: "Mom said that people who say this are bad people." Simple and direct, no need to use their brains, the director is ready, and the audience only needs to devote themselves to the nervous escape, but if the theme is to explore human nature, Not even arranging for a transition and transition would be too smug. The same rude statement also includes the director's camera language. After Daejeon Station was occupied by zombies, when everyone returned to the train, the camera turned around for no reason (even if a sound prompt was given) and aimed at the window where the zombies were about to fall. This The behavior means "Watch out, the zombies are coming out of here", which is tantamount to spoilers for a zombie movie that needs to create a constant sense of horror and insecurity.
The camera suddenly turns around and waits for the zombies to drop
Zombie movies have already improved the abilities of corpses for visual effects. The "Guide" records an incident: a person stands at one end of the broken bridge, and at the other end is a group of zombies. These zombies try to approach this person, but one after another fell off the broken bridge, during which no zombie realized what happened, but practiced the same purpose one after another - to eat him. This shows that human beings have no intelligence after being transformed into zombies. The clever writers of World War Z (2013) solved this problem, that is, there are enough numbers, so there is a classic big scene in zombie movies, the high wall is high enough, and the corpse pile is high enough.
Zombie Mountain
At the end of "Train to Busan", the penultimate level, the screenwriter also cleverly added a zombie bridge. If the "Guide" is strictly followed, this bridge will not be established. Zombies can build a corpse bridge by relying on their eating instinct, but the last similarity between zombies and humans is that they are both flesh and blood. Under the drag of the high-speed train, without the protagonist's hands and feet, the zombies are separated from their flesh and blood.
In addition to spending some thought on the visuals, the structure basically follows the formula of the "Zombie Survival Guide" and most zombie films, the director has greater ambitions, and too many social issues want to finish on this train. The two old grandmothers are typical housewives without self. I think Grandma Mawei will live for her husband and children all her life. After she became a zombie, the curly-haired grandma rebuked with tears in her eyes: "I gave birth to such a son and gave him everything. Since I just left like this, why do I have to live so hard? Like an idiot, like a fool." At the beginning of the film, Shi Yu's mother and Shi Yu's dialogue. The son is almost middle-aged, but the mother's heart is always inseparable from the family that worries about her son. Judging from Shi Yu's annoyed expression, the mother should usually be a person who is ignored or even self-neglected. After the zombie incident broke out, the mother called her son, obviously she had been attacked, but her world was still a son and a granddaughter, "I love Soo An so much, but she wants to find her mother..." Neglected people, just like What the curly-haired grandma asked, why do you have to live so hard? The phone hangs up with Shi Yu's mother's suffocation, but Shi Yu is too calm and even cold.
Mothers who have worked hard all their lives
It is mentioned in the "Guide" that after humans become zombies, they have no emotions and will not retain any memories of their lives. The curly-haired grandma said through the glass, "Sister has worked hard", and then opened the door that isolates yin and yang. It's the only moving part of the whole film. The truth is too cruel. Isn't this the end of Shi Yu's mother? Isn't that what happened to these mothers?
"He came from the grave, and his body was full of maggots and filth. There was no life in his eyes, no warmth in his skin, not a single heartbeat in his chest. His soul was as empty and dark as the night sky. He Laughing at human swords and despising human arrows, because none of them can shake his body. Because eternity is so long, he walks on the earth, sucking the mellow blood of life, and devouring the accursed bones. Be careful, he The living dead."
—From an obscure Hindu text, circa 1000 BCE.
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