Wen 丨 Gray Wolf
Because of the epidemic, the release of "Busan Trip 2" should have been said to be timely. As we rejoice that the epidemic in Asia is receding, we might as well imagine that if this outbreak were not COVID-19, but a zombie virus like Busan Trip, humans might not be able to resist it at all.
Busan Trip 2
If "Busan Trip 2" is made into a zombie virus prevention and treatment theme, it must be a suitable work. But South Koreans will certainly not do this, because Korean disaster films and disaster films will always adhere to a necessary logic: the shamelessness of the government is far greater than all natural disasters.
Therefore, "Busan Trip 2" began with a national rout, fleeing from the peninsula to Japan and then diverting to Hong Kong. The peninsula itself has been reduced to a devastated apocalyptic land, and the film even uses the mouth of an American news commentator to hack its own government: South Korea has no ability to control the disease, and the only safe place on the peninsula is North Korea.
At the point of black government, Korean movies have always been clear-cut and extremely sharp, and it is not an exaggeration to say that it is the biggest feature. However, the black government has become the "political correctness" of Korean films, and it has indeed caused many drawbacks such as single themes and repetitive models.
In other words, if this can be effectively used by [the black government], it can reach the upper limit of Korean standard genre films like "Busan Trip", and if it can't play a role, it can only refresh the lower limit of Korean genre films like "Busan Row 2".
To make this position work, to translate political attitudes into cinematic power, fundamentally requires an allegorical and historical construct. In this regard, genres like "The Barber of Hyok-dong" and "Taxi Driver" are naturally unique (after all, this concept is the legacy of the 1980s democracy movement), but genre films such as "The Monster of the Han River", "The Invasion of Clematis", and "Busan Trip" can also do this, that is, rely on the setting of the characters and the scale of human nature.
Monsters of the Han River
That's why Korean movies are so fond of torturing humanity in times of crisis, like kim Yoe-sung, the executive secretary of the passenger transport company played by Kim Yoe-sung in "Busan Trip", who can sacrifice anyone for his own life, and his behavior proves that human nature is more terrifying than zombies. There is also the grandmother played by Park Myung-shin, because she is not accustomed to the selfishness and greed of the people in the carriage, she opens the hatch to make the whole car suffer.
These moments, these choices, and these characters constitute the emotional coherence and power continuity of Busan Trip, which together constitute an allegorical and historical one.
《Busan Trip》
But in Busan 2, it's all cut. This is not only a severance of the plot connection with "Busan Trip" (director Yeon Sang-ho openly admits to regretting killing the male protagonist of the previous work), but also cuts off the tone, style and even creative mode of the entire film. More importantly, it abstracts the human speculation of the previous work and the allegorical system of beings.
Moreover, this sequel is not impossible to contact with the previous work, the most typical is Li Zhenxian's mother and daughter trio, which can completely continue the setting of the three survivors of the previous work (at least from the age of coincidence), and can complete a certain cross-time and space intersection with the previous work. But it turns out that they are different people, which means that the army at the end of "Busan Trip" should have shot at pregnant women and children, which reverses the ending of the first part.
The director's "fierceness" in the first part just confirms the weakness of this sequel, according to the scale of the previous work, the rescue plane (the most conventional god of siege) must not come, and the heroine needs at least the male protagonist to live for his life, so that his atonement can also be rationalized (according to the logic of the previous film, it is still the priority to let women and children survive). This weakness is also reflected in a kind of indecision, in the critical moment of getting on the plane, the characters in the film are either magic or crying and sensational, completely ignoring their own danger, and time seems to stop because of them.
Similarly, how noble Kong You's end-of-line rescue in the previous work (he completed some kind of transformation) is, how mechanical Jiang Dongyuan's actions in this film are — he is a completely failed protagonist, facing all kinds of successive failures from beginning to end: the national rout, the guilt of not rescuing the weak, the death of his sister and nephew, the death of his brother-in-law, the miscarriage of the gold-grabbing mission.
A series of failures make the protagonist's actions seem meaningless, his guilt and atonement have never been implemented, and the heroine and other people have not sparked any sparks, it is a completely wandering existence. This weakened mobility leads the characters into the trap of Hollywood's unavoidable plays. Some would argue that this is a problem with the actors (after all, he dragged the movie back in "Man Wolf"), but it is actually a matter of script and character setting.
In other words, the core of busan trip 2 is no longer the character-sociological model of the previous game, but the game mode of the environment that is popular in today's big productions. This is an essential difference, like the former is a puzzle of human nature connected by train cars, while the latter's characters are completely hidden in the visual environment.
Compared to Busan Trip, this sequel has darker tones, more aerial shots, more fake scenes, and few impressive plots or character actions. The heroine, Lee Jung-hyun, and the two children can't impress the audience, as if they exist to race, drift and complete monster hunting tasks. This is also why the weapon in "Busan Trip 2" obviously upgraded the weapon to an automatic rifle, but the actual effect is far less than the three people in the previous game who broke into the carriage with their bare hands or with a bat.
On the whole, Busan Trip 2 is closer to a survival game or parkour game, and these external features are undoubtedly hard-ripped from Hollywood films such as Resident Evil and Fast and Furious, and even the prop vehicles are full of the bad taste of the "Mad Max" series.
Many imported elements are woven into the skin of Korean blockbusters, but from the perspective of "cool films", the scheduling ability of Korean filmmakers cannot support Hollywood-style audiovisual continuity bombardment, coupled with the poor special effects, which puts "Busan Line 2" in an extremely awkward position: neither like Korean nor the world.
This model has allowed this year's films such as "Baekdusan" and "Busan Trip 2" to repeatedly brush down the lower limit of Korean genre films, which is not only reflected in the plagiarism collage of elements, the single tediousness of the core (blindly black government), the ubiquity of loopholes, but also in the disregard for the deep reflection of national character.
From the perspective of genre films alone, South Korea has indeed made great progress, and has also created a zombie painting style like "Busan Trip", which has even influenced the palace zombie drama "Kingdom" in the past two years, achieving a "new wave of Asian zombies". However, Korean genre films have never been "pure genre", and they must be combined with the personality of their own culture, national character, and deep topics of human nature reflection to be effective.
The Kingdom
In addition to the financial, technical, and scheduling capabilities, the biggest advantage of Hollywood genre films is that they can intervene and solve any problems from the perspective of "all humanity", but the filmmakers of the nation-state can hardly control this perspective.
For example, the Korean films we enjoy the most, in addition to dissecting human nature like sociological experiments, can basically reflect the basic characteristics of Koreans: true love, extremely vulgar side, machismo, and so on.
This is the sharpest knife of Korean cinema, its power has always come from the national character and the analysis and torture of itself, and only in this context can works such as "Old Boy", "Busan Trip", "Parasite" and other works be successful, and vice versa, Bong Joon-ho, Park Chan-wook and others have broken into Hollywood.0 So we can say that the more Korean, the more the world. On the contrary, the more the world, the less Korean.
"Old Boys"
This is the difference between the inside out and the outside in, and perhaps the camera scheduling of the two Busan Trips says it all: the most impactful shot of "Busan Trip" is when the zombies climb the locomotive, and the camera slowly pulls away to see the whole picture of the large group of zombies climbing the train.
In "Busan Row 2", hollywood-style aerial photography abuse makes everything clear, and there is less of the kind of thing that can bloom. This kind of shooting method is really not suitable for Korean movies.