I Took The Train to Busan And I’m Never Coming Back!

Just now I created an account on “my drama list” and added all of the live action drama’s that I’ve seen and WHAT!? I’ve seen 24.02 days of live action drama’s!? Oh wait 24.02 hours.

Yesterday I posted a Twitter poll asking if people would be interested if I started talking about live action drama’s more, and to my grand surprise I got three votes for yes and zero votes for no.

Considering that everyone follows me for anime (except for that one time I decided to watch the liar game live-action tv show for a while) I’d expect the response to be “NO. NEVER. WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT!?” but the fact that so much as a few people wrote yes made me want to talk about it anyway.

If 3/7 billion people say yes to it, you know you’re on to a good thing!

Train to Busan was a film that made me want to watch more live action stuff! It was the first Korea drama I’ve ever seen and I somehow really connected with it despite it’s absurdity.

It’s about a dad and his daughter trying to find their mother in Busan. But theirs a problem – they have to take a train to get there first! Oh yeah, it’s a train during the zombie apocalypse.

Thus commences a story about going from train station to train station, carriage to carriage, to try and get out of there.

Needless to say it’s a horror show, but it’s so funny to watch that you can’t dislike how silly it is.

The main character Seok Woo is a very hard worker, but as a consequence he spends his time away from his family and barely knows his daughter despite the fact that he has custody… I think.

So for his daughters birthday he decides to get his daughter… a nintendo wii. What a great guy! He comes across as really trying to “buy her off” so to speak but it is a pretty sweet product placement. But it turns out that she already has a wii, and it’s the exact same wii, still in the same box that is identical to the one he gave her and all because her mum got there first!

Instead of that she begs to go on the train to Busan to see her mother for the first time in ages. The dad reluctantly agreed and took the day off to do so. This is when the apocolypse hit, and he began the redemption story of the life time.

As they take the train it gets infected with a victim and spreads to many carriages, and every possible scenario that could take place with a train takes place. They got blocking the carriage doors, fist-fighting their way backwards through the carriages to the toilets, driving the train, stopping at the first safe train station spot only to find it’s not safe, fighting outside the train and everything!

But the reason why I felt able to spoil vague plot details so readily is that one, knowing what it is won’t spoil anything because it’s a great fun to watch, and two, it’s all about the drama and the emotional moments which take place.

It’s not just the dad who gets a cool story. It’s a lot of people. There are a lot of side characters who go through a lot of emotional stories to make themselves better people and it’s really fun to see.

You do sort of find yourself crying in places because of just how sweet it is.

Alternatively the anime film I had watched only seconds before was complete shite and also set in the zombie apocalypse.

So yeah, live action, seems like a cool thing to look at more, since I’m getting bored of anime, even though of course I’m going back to it, so don’t you worry.