I just finished rewatching Train to Busan and I am very In My Feelings about how goddamn flawless it is. The entire thing functions as a critique of classism and the importance of community, empathy and selflessness over individual survivalism, and I fucking love it.
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The opening shot shows us a mechanised traffic warden alerting oncoming cars to slow down for quarantine by waving its arm up and down,then cuts to a real human performing the more complex task of actually flagging & speaking to drivers - a contrast of real humanity vs facsimile.
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Following this, there's a continuing focus throughout the film on shots of people's hands - notably those of the protagonist Seok-woo & his daughter, Su-an, but also those of other characters - emphasising the difference between creation & connection and destructive zombie claws.
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There's also a mirror-game going on in the characterisation of Seok-woo vs that of Yon-suk, the selfish COO of the railway company. Yon-suk is a dark mirror of Seok-woo's averted future: the man he might've become without this crisis and the intervention of his daughter.
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The two are paralleled often: most notably the moment when Seok-woo initially tries to keep two people from their carriage out of fear of infection, but relents at Su-an's request, vs Yon-suk doing the same to their party later, with a deliberate shot of him ignoring Su-an.
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Over and over again, the film shows how destructive Yon-suk's selfish form of survivalism is. Driven by fear, his actions lead directly to the deaths of others, but do not save him in the end: a deliberate irony, as he runs the railway - the cinematic world - the others rely on.
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