Movie Review: Seoul Station 2016

Seoul Station 2016, the zombie movie Hollywood could learn something from. If you’re the type that enjoys the zombie genre, you would know by now that it’s almost a dying niche of horror. Zombie movies, like Vigilante films, follow a predictable course that there is barely room for new plot development. It’s a challenge to deliver something new to a genre that has a fixed formula.

It usually starts with an unsuspecting victim(s) being turned until the numbers start to pile up. The problem is recognized by other survivors but they have no idea what to do. More dead bodies piling up. Quarantine procedures have been implemented only to be to foiled by some important plot point human error. More dead bodies piling up. It all goes down to every man for himself worst case scenario. And you’ve guessed it right, more dead bodies piling up.

There’s little room for creativity when the zombie genre is focused on the blood and gore. But creative writers have worked their way around the genre and have introduce bearable plot twists and solid story telling techniques to make the genre worthwhile. I’m not talking about Zombie x Human romance (I still need to see real success in that pursuit).

I’m talking about exploring other angles that show how human we are when faced with unnatural situations. Zombies have to be there creating a mess in the story but the story doesn’t need to be focused on running away to survive. Seoul Station 2016 proved there are still a lot of areas storytellers could explore in a rigid plot.

Warning; This review contains spoilers. No really, I will spoil this movie for you. I'm just going to insert this trailer to set the mood.

Summary of the Post:

The Plot
Characters
Film Strengths
Things to improve on
Conclusion
Footer

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The Plot

The story takes place before the events from the Train to Busan.

Homeless old man that bleeds from the neck shows up randomly at the Seoul Train Station. As human beings are capable of doing acts of altruism, people who noticed the man’s distress did what any rational person would do, ignore him to death in a corner. Thus, nobody saw him turning into a zombie.

Hye-Sun, a runaway daughter, wakes up at an inn looking for Ki-Woong (her boyfriend). Ki-Woong plans on pimping her for rent money and it’s not the first time it happened. Since times were hard for a young couple, Hye-Sun didn’t have a job and her boyfriend spends countless hours in an internet cafe doing his best to be useless for society. It was bound to happen that these two would argue a lot especially after Hye-Sun finds out of her boyfriend’s plan on pimping her.

Ki-Woong, displaying one of the most likeable traits a human being could have, starts to remind Hye-Sun’s situation before he took her in after running away. Hye-Sun is then told not to come back to the inn.

In comes Suk-Gyu, Hye-Sun’s father who got wind of her whereabouts after Hye-Sun’s boyfriend uploaded a picture of his daughter asleep (not in revealing clothes to my surprise). Like any responsible father than wants his daughter back, he goes searching for the person that uploaded it.

Hye-Sun, now homeless again, enters the train station for a place to sleep in. The station was a place where the homeless would sleep in during the night. This is the part where the living dead make a scene and the story of survival takes off. Suk-Gyu and the coerced Ki-Woong set forth to find Hye-Sun in the quarantine zone.

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Characters

The characters are easy to get along with. They have simple motivations and react to the circumstances like what any normal person would do when confronted with the strange. There’s no glamour on how the characters behaved in the story. We don’t get to see our protagonists do something heroic. We never get to see them spew some inspiring lines. I think those elements made this fiction believable.

What we do get to see are natural human reactions when confronted with the reality of impending doom. I was initially annoyed with Hye-Sun’s character being a cry baby and hoping for salvation in the hands of her boyfriend. You think after a revelation that he’s been abusing her the whole time would slap some sense into her. But then I started to think about her as a teenager who has yet to get a firm grasp of the harsh reality around her.

It had been implied that she has gone through quite a lot before she started living with her boyfriend. So I guess I could give her some slack for being immature and still coping with her life situation. As I was watching the events unfold, I noticed there were details that are a bit sketchy when it comes to character motivations. But I suspected these minor details missing were part of building up a plot twist later on, and I was right.

Though the character motivations are realistic enough, there’s nothing else to be praiseworthy about their development throughout the story. Who they are from the beginning is who they are still at the end (no real improvement). I could not compel myself to love the characters for who they are. It felt like I was watching them go through the survival journey to pass the time. I’m not rooting for them to survive or die. I’m just watching them.

It’s the expendable side characters you should be cheering on. The side characters our protagonists meet along the way contribute to the narrative through making our protagonists look bad. Like really bad. You actually feel sorry that their screen times are cut abruptly by a plot twist after doing something that could compel you to cheer them on.

Ki-Woong is a coward and a douche but he’s the only person that responded to Hye-Sun’s need. Suk-Gyu’s character is too plain to understand. And when you’re familiar with how Koreans develop plain characters in their shows, your guess is right that there’s going to be a plot twist somewhere down the road.

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Film Strengths

You can expect a lot of suspense and plot twists even if the story flow is linear. It’s not really explosive but just enough to keep you jolted once in a while and remind you that you’re watching horror. The action is well paced with the anticipation that shit is about to go down and hard.

It’s does a respectable job of portraying their own version of zombies. Looking at how they depict zombies, you can see much emphasis in the eyes and the form is less grotesque than most Western zombie films. Korean zombies are unique in their own form.

I like the idea of how unprepared the people were during wave of infection. Even during this day and age of information, having no clue about what zombies are would get people to suspect you live in a cave. But the film perfectly portrays how people react to the bizarre. It would only take 1 infected person in a populated area to do damage to civilization. Why?

Because not everyone will entertain the absurd possibility and consider a bizarre truth that zombies just popped out of the blue and are going after you. I’m gonna tell you right now that there’s going to be a selfie posted on twitter, instagram, and other social media sites with captions like “zombies! Lol” first before panic sets in. It’s ridiculous to even think zombies are real and this is what the film really portrayed well. Our unpreparedness to handle the bizarre.

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Things to Improve on

The film needs work on the character development. There’s little reason to like our main heroes and the film justifies that by having the side character possess greater pleasing qualities. They got the plot twists, action, and adrenaline pumping scenes covered. I’m not saying these characters were badly carried.

I’m saying these characters were so basic that it’s unrealistic to expect them doing something amazing. The zombie epidemic could have triggered a person to become stronger but we have close to human characters that didn’t get the message it’s was time to man up.

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Conclusion

It’s a horror movie worth the watch. If the zombie films are your thing, this one does a decent job at setting a reality Hollywood didn't want to highlight. If a zombie epidemic ever happened, majority would still be dumbstruck to act or be too busy uploading the news to their social media accounts. We're conditioned to automatically see zombies as works of fiction and mystery lacking. They can be understood by logic.

The movie levels with our reality and shows how strong our belief in what is normal around us. When confronted with something that triggers cognitive dissonance, our decision making slows down to try and enforce acceptable sense. In case of a zombie epidemic during it's humble beginnings, we lack the creativity to be prepared for the unknown.

I would forgive this movie for so-so animation. The twists, tension building, and climactic scenes are worth watching for.

7/10

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Source: 1st Image and 2nd Image

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