Last month, the cinema was lifted!
The cold winter of the film and television industry finally ushered in its end.
Although everyone can go out of the house and watch happily in the cinema, there are actually very few new films broadcast.
Most of what the cinema broadcasts are old movies that we “owe a movie ticket” .
For example, "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone", "Interstellar" and so on...
And in these days when audiences around the world have no new movies to watch, South Korea dropped a "blockbuster" !
After a lapse of four years, they released the sequel to the movie "Travel to Busan" on July 15 this year-
Busan Tour 2: Peninsula
부산행2-반도
Once the film was released, it demonstrated its powerful dominance.
South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia, and Vietnam were the first to be released in five places, and it won the box office championship in all five places.
The cumulative box office in South Korea has reached 29.9 billion won , becoming the highest-grossing film in Korea in 2020 .
This result does not seem to be sorry everyone has waited for four years.
However, the plunge in word of mouth still exposed the shortcomings of the film.
From 8.5 in the first part to 5.6 in the second part , what happened to the "Travel to Busan" series?
Today we will talk about why this "Korean zombie movie" has fallen to this point.
1,
Before talking about Korean-style zombie films, let's briefly understand the origin of "zombie films".
Zombie (Zombie), also known as the "living dead", is a monster of Western science fiction entertainment works that often appear.
They become corpses that can walk upright due to certain mutations, such as viral infections, biochemical factors, etc.
The term zombies originated from the "Voodoo" culture in Haiti.
In their belief, the dead can be resurrected, but the resurrection referred to here is not to resurrect from the dead, but to kill you first and then make you the living dead.
In this way, the resurrected people have no sense of autonomy, and can be manipulated by the wizards who perform the resurrection ceremony, and become zombies.
However, such zombies are still not much the same as we remembered. They neither cannibalize people, nor decay their bodies, but are controlled by people.
The current zombies should be a combination of the living dead and rabies elements.
As we all know, rabies virus is spread mainly through bites and scratches, using saliva as a carrier. The infected person will be extremely manic and aggressive after the onset of the disease, which is consistent with the characteristics of zombies.
Birth zombie image of the true sense, or from the 1968 George Romero · A · directed the film "Night of the Living Dead" .
This movie is widely regarded as the "founder of the mountain" of contemporary zombie films , and countless zombie films since then followed this film's routine.
Elements such as zombie outbreaks, highways, communities, streets, shopping malls, slowly coming zombies, fortresses held by survivors, and the transformation of relatives and friends into zombies have almost become the "standard" of all zombie films in the future.
This is not only true of the classic American blockbuster "Resident Evil" and "The Walking Dead", it is also true of the "Busan Tour" series.
2,
2016, South Korean director Yan Hao still shooting zombie film "Busan line" was a huge success.
He used his lens to create a doomsday world.
A sudden biochemical leak caused the collapse of modern daily life.
The man who was planning to take his daughter to find his ex-wife was trapped in an infected train with his daughter.
The small train space makes fear nowhere to hide.
Students, pregnant women, politicians, elderly people, train conductors and other passengers form a miniature society on the train.
Here, everything must make way for "survival."
The movie "Travel in Busan" is a rare masterpiece in terms of scene description, characterization, or social metaphor.
From the scene, it may be because of cost constraints, most of the scenes are produced in closed spaces like trains.
But in fact, as long as the friends who love watching thrillers know that the more closed and narrow the scene, the easier it is for fear to be magnified.
The classic small-cost horror films "Chain Saw" and "Painful Party" are the best of this kind of movies.
And "Travel to Busan" captures this essence.
With the least cost, made the best sense of doomsday presence.
In such a limited space as trains and stations, the director has almost brought the function of "doors" into full play.
On the surface, it isolates the zombies and survivors, leaving a safe space for everyone.
But in fact, it also isolates the good and evil of human nature, leaving some people outside the door, and some people inside the door.
It lets you know that sometimes, the evil of human nature is more terrifying than zombies.
In terms of characters, the male protagonist played by Kong Yoo was originally a profit-seeking person.
What he chose at the beginning was to protect himself in troubled times, and it was enough to take care of himself.
So when the zombie came, he could shut the pregnant woman out without hesitation; when looking for an escape, he only chose the back road for himself.
But on the subsequent journey, the second man and the pregnant woman saved his daughter regardless of previous suspicions; the tramp chose to save him in a critical moment.
After these kinds of events, he started to change.
In the end, the goodness in the human nature defeated the other side and decided to sacrifice himself to save others.
This arc of characters with transformation makes the hero's character more three-dimensional and the character more plump.
Even the villains, the directors have carefully shaped them.
The villain is an extreme egoist who is willing to sacrifice anyone for his own benefit.
In the beginning, they just encouraged everyone to close the door to prevent the male lead and the group from coming. In the later stage, the conductor could even be pushed to the zombies in exchange for the chance to survive, which made people hate it.
But when he finally changed his body, everyone would find that all he did was actually just to go home and see his mother.
Such real characterization and scene depiction give "Travel to Busan" its own depth.
In "Travel to Busan 2", there is no such thing, and the overall shape is a super plane.
The second story happened four years after the first incident.
The male protagonist played by Jiang Dongyuan and his brother-in-law fled to Hong Kong as survivors, where everyone thinks they are virus carriers and discriminates against them.
At this time, a gangster found them and asked them to return to South Korea to get back a sum of stolen money.
If successful, they will each receive a huge sum of money to improve their lives.
As a result, they readily decided to accept the commission of the gang and returned to Korea to start fighting with the zombies.
They met good guys and bad guys, finally saved the good guys, defeated the bad guys and fled South Korea, HE!
It's that simple?
That's right! The plot is that simple!
It seems that there is no connection with the first part at all. The only thing they have in common is probably the dao (yan).
And the characterization of the male protagonist is not OK at all!
He has no personal growth at all, from beginning to end, he is a very righteous and passionate person.
At the end, let the male protagonist with a sense of justice to save people, everyone will feel that it should be, instead of moving like the male protagonist in the first part, there is no character arc at all.
Because the front character paving was not done well, the sensational scenes at the back of the movie became deliberate.
And the motivation to support the male protagonist to return to South Korea is not very understandable, for the money?
Please! It's already such a doomsday environment, can money be more important than life? The shaping of this motivation is not convincing.
3.
Originally in the first part, the film’s satirical metaphor for the government was a highlight.
In the first part, it is clear that the situation is already very serious, but the TV station is still concealing the real situation, insisting that this is a mass riot, so that all the Datian Station troops that went to suppress it fell.
At the end, when the pregnant woman and the little girl walked out of the tunnel, the superior gave the shooting order without hesitation. If there was no such song, they would have died on the spot.
These scenes are all metaphors for the upper class at the expense of the safety of the people in order to maintain the stability of the regime.
This is also a bold and critical expression that has always been used in Korean movies.
Korean filmmakers are good at expressing the real social status quo in fictional plots and criticizing them accordingly.
"Snow Train" and "The Melting Pot" are all like this.
After adding such elements, "Travel to Busan" has its own unique regional style.
In this way, a new type of "Korean zombie film" was created.
It is precisely because of this that countless people have seen the charm of "Korean-style zombies" different from traditional zombie films.
Only then have the first and second seasons of the "Kingdom" of the Palace Fighting Zombies, the comedy "Wonderful Family", and the new drama "Zombie Detective" etc...
Zombie movies are no longer a "patent" in Europe and America, but also have a place in South Korea.
Therefore, the most important reason that caused "Travel in Busan 2" to hit the street is that it has lost the essence of Korean-style zombies .
From the perspective of the screen alone, there is no need to say that "Tour to Busan 2" is almost a Hollywood standard, bloody violence and high-intensity action scenes, not many.
Drag racing, gun battles, zombie arena... all kinds of curious and bloody killing scenes are crazy to stimulate your eyeballs .
As a commercial cool film, "Travel to Busan 2" is qualified.
But as a "Korean zombie movie", it failed.
It almost discarded all the highlights in the first film, was completely Hollywoodized and reduced to a typical American commercial blockbuster.
There is no depiction of human nature, no social metaphors, only the stimulating images of blood spurting and rising adrenaline.
This is also a point that disappoints people.
If you just want to see a masterpiece of zombies, there are more choices in European and American movies, and there are countless better than "Travel in Busan 2".
But since we chose to watch "Travel in Busan 2", we definitely want to see not only zombies, but also other and more things.
Although it is directed by the same director, it has to be said that word of mouth is inevitable for this movie.
The director Yeon Sangho may want to abandon the original model and open up a new way of "Traveling in Busan".
After all, he has written all the characters of the previous game to death, and it is even more difficult to write a sequel.
Unexpectedly, what he abandoned was the most important thing.
If he doesn't change it seriously, I think "Tour to Busan 3" may hit the street even more.
Let's do the first part of "Travel to Busan" obediently again!
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