Train to Busan is an incredible film. A core theme of the movie is the idea of preserving communalism and helping out one another. There is also a large critique aimed at capitalism, especially since the ideals of capitalism essentially “created” the zombies in the film.
Oddly enough, I found the film to be very comparable to a great deal of Martin Scorsese films, with some notable alterations. Scorsese’s films all showcase a criticism of corporate power, which is similar to the criticisms of capitalism and corporatism in Train to Busan. A good example would be Killers of the Flower Moon, his most recent masterpiece. In the film Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert DeNiro’s characters quite literally kill people in order to get money. This is similar to the character Yon-suk in Train To Busan. He kills people and pushes them in front of the zombies in order to protect his own skin. Even when people do good things for him, he still uses that as an opportunity to catch them off guard and be safer himself.
In Scorsese films and Train To Busan, characters who only fend for themselves tend to get what’s coming to them by the end of the movie. Henry Hill doesn’t stay a gangster on the streets. Almost everyone dies in The Departed. Train To Busan is no different. Yon-suk eventually does die and becomes an infected zombie. This was exactly what he feared most, what he was trying to prevent by any means necessary yet it still happened to him. It goes to showcase that the themes of individualism can be fairly universal across different companies and different demographics, and a scaling criticism of capitalism is usually successful.
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