June 12, 2025

Peninsula: The Walking Dead Abroad

As someone who worked on the digital marketing campaigns for The Walking Dead for a few seasons, I'm well aware that the most frustrating aspect of zombie movies -- and zombie TV shows for that matter -- is the habit of having characters take actions that serve no purpose except to attract the undead humans they're supposed to avoid. You can see what I mean in Peninsula when a treasure-seeker tries to extract a corpse from a van loaded with money instead of doing the logical thing: grabbing a bag of cash from the back then going on his way. His disastrous action isn't about greed; it's about attracting all the zombies in the vicinity. Which then turns the movie into a shooter game. Well, much of the world of Peninsula looks computer-generated so that aligns.

Yeon Sang-ho's Train to Busan sequel also suffers because it inserts a lot of unnecessary English, one assumes to attract American viewers. I honestly believe that this inclination, indeed this constant pressure, for artworks to be all things to all people is art's undoing. One need only look at Yeon's infinitely better vastly underrated Psychokinesis to see the man is hardly a one-hit wonder. And Peninsula is doing many things right: the family survival story, the military gone berserk story, the American imperialism story... I guess it's just that when you make movies as good as Train to Busan and Psychokinesis, I expect better. Even if this is better than most of the zombie content out there.