Peninsula (2020)

🚗💥🧟 “Fast & Furious: Zombie Drift.”

Let’s start by showing y’all the trailers shall we?

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Non-Spoiler Plot Overview

Peninsula isn’t so much a sequel to Train to Busan as it is a spinoff. Set in the same universe, four years after the Busan outbreak, the film shifts away from emotional survival horror and leans hard into action-thriller territory.

Instead of a tight, claustrophobic train ride, we get a Mad Max-style romp through a zombie-infested Korean wasteland. A team is hired to retrieve money left behind, but of course, it all goes sideways—because humans suck just as much as zombies.

It’s flashy, chaotic, and nowhere near as heartfelt as its predecessor.


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Character Rundown

Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won) – Former soldier, guilt-ridden over choices he made at the outbreak. He’s our main protagonist, but compared to Seok-woo from Train to Busan, he’s flatter, more archetype than human.

Min-jung (Lee Jung-hyun) – A survivor raising her two kids in the wreckage. She brings more emotional weight than anyone else.

Jooni & Yu-jin (the kids) – Two of the best parts of the movie, mostly because they’re resourceful and add some much-needed heart.

Captain Seo & Unit 631 – The human villains, a militia-like group of unhinged survivors who run cruel gladiator games with captured humans vs. zombies. Cartoonishly evil, but they keep the tension up.



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Pacing / Episode Flow

The film starts with tragedy, fast-forwards four years, then drops us into a heist-turned-chaos setup. The middle is bogged down by too much “humans are the real monsters” cliché, but the action ramps up into pure spectacle by the end.

And yes, there’s a massive CGI car chase finale—think Fast & Furious, but with zombies. Whether you find it ridiculous or entertaining probably decides how much you’ll like the movie.


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Pros

The setting. Post-apocalyptic Korea is bleak, eerie, and different from the usual zombie landscapes.

The kids. Legit some of the best characters, saving the film from drowning in clichés.

Action set-pieces. Over-the-top, but admittedly fun if you treat it as a popcorn flick.

A few emotional beats. Min-jung and her family bring back a glimpse of the humanity that Train to Busan thrived on.



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Cons

Tone whiplash. Horror one minute, Michael Bay explosions the next.

Forgettable villains. Evil-for-the-sake-of-evil humans without much depth.

Too much CGI. Especially the car chase finale—it looks like a video game cutscene.

No emotional gut-punch. Compared to the first film’s heartbreak, this feels hollow.



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Final Thoughts

Peninsula isn’t Train to Busan 2. It’s a spinoff that trades character-driven horror for flashy zombie action. That doesn’t make it bad—it’s entertaining in spurts—but if you came looking for another emotional rollercoaster, you’ll leave disappointed.

It works best if you set your expectations to “zombie action flick” rather than “zombie masterpiece.”


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Rating

6/10


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🚨 Spoiler Warning 🚨

Spoilers

The film opens with Jung-seok failing to save a family (Min-jung and her kids) at the start of the outbreak. Four years later, he and other survivors are sent back into Korea on a mission to retrieve millions of dollars. Naturally, zombies swarm, people die, and the survivors get captured by Unit 631—a deranged militia.

The militia hosts gruesome “games” where prisoners are thrown into an arena with a swarm of zombies, a sequence that’s more Hunger Games than horror. Jung-seok is reunited with Min-jung and her daughters, the very family he abandoned years earlier. Guilt drives him to help them escape.

From there, the movie spirals into chaos: shootouts, car battles, and hordes of sprinting zombies everywhere. The climax is one giant CGI chase with cars plowing through zombies like a demolition derby. It’s fun but ridiculous, a total departure from the intimate tension of Train to Busan.

In the end, there’s sacrifice, redemption, and some tears—though nowhere near the heartbreak of Seok-woo’s death in the first film. It lands more as an “action finale” than an emotional farewell.