South Korea’s Train to Busan was one of the best zombie films in years with a fantastically executed premise and emotional gut punches that felt like they came out of an Oscar-nominated drama, not a genre film. Fans have been clamoring for a sequel since the original came out in 2016, and now the first trailer for that film, Peninsula, is here.
Peninsula, which is once again directed by Yeon Sang-ho, picks up four years after the events of Train to Busan. Kang Dong-won and Lee Jung-hyun star in the film, which sees Jung-seok, a soldier who previously escaped the diseased wasteland, on a covert mission into the world outside of safety. Discovering survivors, he is confronted by both the good and bad of humanity as the film dives into the bigger-picture social tropes that zombie franchises often grow into.
The movie is obviously much larger than Train to Busan, which took place almost entirely on a train. The tight setting was one of the reasons that that film worked so well, so it will be interesting to see if the growth of the franchise’s world can deliver the same kind of impact. One of the things that did stand out about the original was its ability to combine both traditional zombie tropes with actual human emotion, so if Yeon can bring that back to this film, it could work really well. The expanded world definitely pushes the series into a more post-apocalyptic setting with tones of Mad Max and I Am Legend permeating throughout.
Train to Busan premiered at Cannes in 2016, but given the postponement of the festival this year, Peninsula will most likely not have a festival opening. It’s scheduled to release in July in South Korea but has no U.S. or international release date yet, and it probably won’t until the coronavirus pandemic has ceased.
