Seoul Station

Seoul Destroying

Seoul Station
South Korea 2016
Directed by Yeon Sang-ho
Studio Canal Blu Ray Zone B

Where to start with Seoul Station. Well, technically it’s a prequel to the live action movie Train To Busan, by the same director, which I reviewed here. Although, I think he started working on this well before that movie, since this one was released only a month after that first film was released (to much success... which I suspect helped get the distribution deal pushed forward to let this one out of the gate). So I reckon that the correct point of view is probably that Train To Busan is actually a live action sequel to the animated movie Seoul Station but, whichever way you say it, since it’s set the day before the events in the other film, it makes it chronologically the first part of the trilogy which ended (to date), with Peninsula (another movie which I’ve not seen but thanks to the price of a fiver in Computer Exchange, I should be watching that one too fairly soon).

Now it’s been ages since I saw that first movie and I can’t remember much about it but, like most zombie movies, it gives no explanation of how the zombie virus actually got started. In this film, you see an infected homeless man pass away in the titular station and then start off the wave of zombies that are already unleashed during the events of that follow up (or whatever you want to call it) movie. 

However, don’t expect to find out what caused the zombie outbreak in the first place because, again like most tales in this genre, although you’re a little closer to ground zero in this movie... you still will be none the wiser as to any explanations for this plague. 

Now, the animation is nice enough and doesn’t look too cheap. Although, if my dad* is to be believed, it’s even worse than a 1970s Filmation cartoon in terms of animation... he bailed on it after a quarter of an hour. It’s... not as bad as 1970s Filmation but, it’s not Disney or Fleischer studios either. It just is what it is and in terms of the art of the ‘cartooning’ on this thing... I didn’t mind it.

But here’s the thing. It has more going for it than just the undead biting people up. It’s character driven... to the point where I thought the first half an hour was relentlessly slow and dull (it gets better) and it has a proper story which included a really neat twist near the end which, I honestly did not see coming. However, due to the way the characters are portrayed, not to mention the consequences of that surprise reveal, which I thought was visually going to be something much different to what it turned out to be... it’s also unrelentingly bleak. Much grimmer than the story portrayed in Train To Busan. Which is perhaps hard to believe given the unstoppable onslaught of people-munching going on throughout that particular movie but, trust me, though it’s not quite as gory as the live action counterpart... it’s vastly more cynical in its outlook. 

The film follows the exploits of a down-on-her-luck young lady who breaks off with her boyfriend, who is trying to pimp her out to pay their rent money. So they are split up and the outbreak leaves them unaware of each other’s locations. Meanwhile, the girl’s father catches up to the boyfriend and threatens him into helping him to find her. Then the zombie pandemic begins and the film cross cuts between the girl and the chaotic experiences she finds herself in... and the boyfriend and father trying to locate her. And it’s... not too terrifying, it has to be said but, like I said, it’s unrelentingly dark. Especially in terms of redeemable characters, for sure. 

My primary criticism of the movie... and this seems to be a more blatant trope of horror films lately, it seems to me... is the unrelenting stupidity of the main protagonists to not keep themselves out of trouble or improve their situation. If you are on the phone to your girlfriend, for example... and she’s just given you her location, you don’t wait on the phone for five minutes to hear how the carnage is playing out on her end of the line... you get in your car and you rescue her pronto, right? Well, apparently not, in the case of these characters, it seems. And, surely, if you are running through buildings, away from zombies who want to eat you... maybe shut a few doors behind you on your way? I mean, the actions of these characters do not endear me to the idea of ever standing beside them if I was ever in a zombie apocalypse. Their choices are just really stupid.

But, it’s an okay film and, that final twist, which makes room for even more bleakness, more than makes up for some of the film’s deficiencies. I mean, yeah, Train To Busan is by far the better, more watchable picture but, I dunno, Seoul Station is so unwavering in its cynical outlook (and has very strong language throughout) that I found the whole experience quite enticing for a while.

But, yeah, that’s me done on Seoul Station and, if you like Train To Busan then you will probably enjoy this one, to some extent. It has so much more going on for it than just being another zombie movie, I reckon. 

 * I wrote this review early last year, when he was still with us. 

Station Eleven

Terminal Act

Station Eleven
by Emily St. John Mandel
Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781447268963

A few months ago I was absolutely bowled over by a new TV miniseries which I watched twice. It was a ten episode show called Station Eleven (reviewed here) and, by the time I was through it the first time, I realised I would have to read the original source novel, which was written by a writer I’d never heard of called Emily St. John Mandel.

And now I have and... well, for starters, it’s great.

I think sometimes it depends what iteration of a piece of art you are exposed to first as to which version you respond to better. I have a Twitter friend (thanks Laura) who said she preferred the book and I suspect, although I may be wrong, that she read the book before seeing the TV show, which was not developed or worked on by the author but by a fellow writer and friend of hers, from what I can understand. As for me... I think I’m just about coming down to preferring the TV show myself but, to be honest, it’s a really hard call. There are major differences between the two... and also many more similarities... but both are carrying the same kind of spirit within their respective media.

I’m not going to go over the basic plot again but it takes place before, during and after a pandemic of Georgian Flu has wiped out the majority of life on Earth and we get scenes of a whole bunch of characters from different times in their lives, their stories slowly developing as they brush against times and places important to other characters, to build an overreaching story arc, of sorts. The novel is split into nine sections - those being 1. The Theatre, 2. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 3. I Prefer You With A Crown, 4. The Starship, 5. Toronto, 6. The Airplanes, 7. The Terminal, 8. The Prophet and 9. Station Eleven... each of these subsections being split into various chapters which generally take on one or two of the characters at a time.

And I think this is a case of the TV show expanding things or taking different directions from the novel in pursuit of a ten episode adaptation and actually improving them... while at other times missing some other specific story beats, which it could perhaps have done with.

For instance, the novel starts off with exactly the same scene as the TV show, with Arthur Leander dying of a heart attack on stage and Jeevan jumping up from the audience to try and save him... also trying to comfort the younger version of Kristen, the same day that the Georgia Flu hits the city. However, unlike the TV show where Jeevan and Kirsten are bonded by the experience and the two of them start off and spend the first year or two in the apartment with Jeevan’s brother, Frank... here they part ways for good. Kirsten can’t remember in the book just how she survived the first year of the pandemic. And Jeevan holes up with Frank and has other experiences separate to hers.

So there is no amateur play adaptation of the graphic novel Station Eleven in the book, put on by Kirsten, Jeevan and Frank as there is in the show. Indeed, Station Eleven is actually a deluxe comic book of two separate issues in the novel (I’m imagining one of those square bound format style graphic novels which were all the rage in the mid-1980s now, like Batman - The Cult or Blood - A Tale). Someone on the internet said that Jeevan is a far less important character in the book than in the show but, I don’t think that’s necessarily the case. He’s just a slightly different character and he does, in fact, touch other’s live (both in negative and positive ways), even if nobody remembers his name. For example, in a newspaper article from the time of the death of Leander, he’s mentioned as ‘a member of the audience’ and everyone post pandemic who reads that surviving newspaper article years later can vaguely remember him.

And he does survive in the book as he does in the show, although we are not treated to that brilliant sequence where he’s helping about 15 to 20 women give birth on the same night in a makeshift hospital upcycled from an old, abandoned supermarket. One the other hand, we do see how he once, quite negatively, touches Miranda’s life in this... on the night that she decides she needs to divorce Arthur Leander, when we become acquainted with one of the professions Jeevan has worked in over the years.

And I knew I was in the hands of a really great writer from very early on in that, Mandel really makes you feel the emotional resonance of the characters by the phrases and choices of words she uses to put across their moments. For instance, there’s a scene in the first section where she could have just said a specific character started to cry... instead, she says this, “The lights over the sea blurred and became a string of overlapping halos.” which is frankly a much better way of getting your message across, I think.

Another thing she does, to keep a sense of continuity going over the rapid ping ponging from different time shifts, is to introduce the occasional themed section, inserted into the narrative as a juxtaposition with whatever character you happen to be following at the time. So, for instance, one of these devices is an interview that Kirsten gives to a brand new, amateur newspaper in one of the new post-pandemic communities, fifteen years after the outbreak of the Georgia Flu. And, later, it makes its way into the airport to Clark (who is a lot thinner and clean shaven compared to the wonderful actor who brought him to life in the TV show) and his Museum Of Civilisation. And it’s from this article that he recognises that Kirsten is someone who would remember Arthur Leander (because, unlike the TV show, they’ve never actually met pre-pandemic).

And, yeah, I don’t think I want to say much more about the original version of Station Eleven other than... The Prophet is, amazingly, a lot less sympathetic a character than in the TV show and that another certain key character, who is visited an antagonistic, violent death in the TV version, is afforded a much more peaceful, ‘TV network unfriendly’, deliberate overdose of sleeping pills here. If you liked the TV show, then I’m pretty certain you’ll want to give this one a go... if you haven’t, well you may want to read this version first and figure out for yourself which bits have been improved and which bits have been left out, to the detriment of the show (whole characters are wiped out in the TV show while others are given more prominence, for example). Both are great and all I can say about the novel, really, is that it’s truly wonderful stuff and I’ll definitely be pursuing some of this writer’s other novels, for sure.

The Sadness

It’s A Sad,
Sad, Sad,
Sad World

The Sadness
aka Ku Bei
Taiwan 2021
Directed by Rob Jabbaz
Machi Xcelsior Studios

Let me say upfront that, The Sadness was filmed using both crypto currency (I still don’t understand that stuff) and the proceeds from the producer’s cam girl business. So, yeah, kinda old school alternate funding methods which might suggest a grittier, grainier product but, I have to say the whole film in terms of the shooting of it looks pretty spectacular and clean (the kind of clean I’d associate with someone like Hal Hartley or Wes Anderson). Even the hand held shaky cam moments in this look positively polished in regards to not pulling the audience out of the movie due to any overt stylistic expressions... at least as far as camera movement goes, at any rate.

However, in terms of the content of those frames, clean is not a word I would readily jump to when describing The Sadness. Once past the basic set up, it’s possibly one of the all time goriest films which I’ve seen in a long time... right up there with movies like, for example, Ichi The Killer... which was even cut on it’s Cat 3 video release... I know because I’d seen it uncut at its only unaltered UK screening at the London Film Festival and had to track down a Dutch DVD of it in the end, to get the full thing. Apparently, the same fate has been meted out to the physical home video release of The Sadness in its own country, where it’s not been released uncut... only at cinemas.

The set up tells of a country who have had their fill of lock downs since the coming of the Coronavirus and so, when a health official is trying to warn the public about a new virus... the Alvin virus... people don’t believe him. It’s all a part of the slow background build as we meet loving young couple Kat (Regina Lei) and Jim (Berant Zhu). They wake up and get into a slight disagreement about holiday plans... then Jim gets on his motor scooter and drops her at the station to go to work. And, as soon as they part ways, the Alvin virus hits and makes itself known in no uncertain terms, as the illness blackens the eyeballs of every infected victim, gives them a disturbing rictus grin and turns them into violent, crazed psychopaths wanting to violently kill, torture and rape anybody and everybody around them, indiscriminately... the act of which also infects the victims (if they’re not already infected) and it very quickly decimates the city... indeed, the country.

So, yeah, an obvious nod to George A. Romero’s The Crazies with the sexual undertone to the killings being an obvious ‘difference’ to maybe differentiate somewhat from both the Romero film and it’s subsequent remake (I’ve not seen the remake but the original Romero is not one I really took to when I first saw it). This one, once the craziness hits, is quite intense and almost continuous gory carnage with the director doing two things to not overload the audience too much and therefore let things get dull.

Firstly, he picks out a few ‘character’ victims and antagonists to repeatedly come back to... giving the audience someone to identify with or be scared of. Secondly, it’s obviously a story that’s mainly focused on Kat and Jim and how they are somehow going to find each other to come together again over the length of the movie (with a fairly predictable outcome, it has to be said)... so he gives both protagonists moments of calm amid the carnage where they are just wandering or existing at the periphery of the events, before taking them back into each new gory set piece.

And what set pieces. It’s fast and ferocious and, honestly, feels very dangerous. There’s an occular destruction moment on board a brilliantly executed  blood bath on a tube train carriage that Kat is riding, initially oblivious that there is any virus in the air, that I totally didn’t see coming due to the way it’s shot and edited... where a recurring, creepy old businessman puts his umbrella through a woman’s eyeball. It’s pretty grim and surprising stuff and, very early on, the director uses the trick of showing that one of the main protagonists is not safe from injury so, yeah, the atmosphere is thick with suspense.

That being said, one of the sequences (which reminded me of a scene that maybe inspired it, in the The Big Nowhere, the unfilmed second novel of James Ellroy’s LA Quartet) where the same creepy guy catches up with the same victim in a hospital and proceeds to vent his virus inspired sexual urges through repeatedly penetrating her eyeball socket with his penis, is kept curiously out of shot. Which seems strange at this point when the audience has already been exposed to a catalogue of fairly imaginative and grotesque violence... although saying that, the way it’s not shown in this sequence means you almost feel it more, as your imagination starts to fill in the gaps.

Another thing the director does, which is quite nice, is to give the same antagonist a moment where, for all intents and purposes, he breaks the fourth wall and talks to the audience as he approaches the camera, axe slung over his shoulder. As it turns out, he’s really talking towards where he assumes the general direction of the fleeing Kat is but, it’s obviously a deliberate moment where the director wants to pop the audience from possible passive disengagement from the violent assault into another level within the frames, so to speak. The director also has a few other tricks up his sleeve such as using a shower curtain to both hide a very grim moment while doubling as an aid to Kat hiding her next move from a potential threat... I could go on about certain aspects of this film in relation to this kind of story telling cunning but, the review would have keep going for a while.

And, of course, the film is fully conscious of the satirical slant of the way in which the authorities are handling (or rather, not surviving) the outbreak, in light of the coronavirus pandemic within which the film was shot (the station and hospital you see in the movie had to be constructed within a studio set, apparently, due to not being able to film in these kinds of locations during the recent outbreak). Absolutely nobody believes anything the doctors are saying about the virus before it hits and everybody in the film seems aware that each new virus outbreak will now be a ‘politicised event’ and utilised by an untrustworthy government who don’t want to instigate another lock down in an election year. Which is, I suspect, pretty much where we are now with things in the UK, even as we are assaulted by a fifth wave which nobody in power wants to acknowledge, while millions are infected (including me, due to our own slack and nefarious government).

And that’s me about done on The Sadness. If you are a fan of zombie movies (which this really isn’t an example of at all, although there is some common DNA in presentation) or viral people turning into rage fuelled aggressors (such as The Crazies or Mom And Dad, reviewed here) then you are probably going to really like this movie. I’m not sure I can say I’m totally sold on the repeat value of this one but, it was kinda fun and it’s technically well put together, especially considering there’s apparently hardly any CGI in the movie and it’s mostly done as practical effects work... outstanding. And not really a horror film either... more science fiction but, I suspect it would play well with a horror crowd, for sure. Worth a look.