The heart in the center of the chaos of Peninsula is not as moving as effective as the father / daughter wrestling from the previous film, but Peninsula does have a pulse. Even though the playing field is now the completely destroyed, ruined port city of Incheon, we still get the smaller, character-oriented story of a former Marine Captain, Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won), who is haunted, years later, by those he both failed to rescue and those he ignored right during the time of his exodus from South Korea during the zombie outbreak.Jung-seok, plagued by guilt of survival, is offered a high-risk job, along with his sister-in-law and two other scavengers, to return to the peninsula and recover a lost pile of money. It’s a redemption story of color by numbers, but Sang-ho sprays it up nicely with a quick one-night hunt in hell itself. Zombie stories are always about difficult choices and the almost impossible challenge of doing the “right” thing. This is why even stories that are a bit derivative, such as Peninsula, can still work on a very basic, cliché level.
Peninsula does not exactly attract an Alien 3 on Su-an and Seong-kyeong from Train to Busan, although an exaggeration of news stories at the top of the film shows us how fast South Korea fell, including Busan, which is referred to as a place people thought was safe in the first days of the crisis, but it was ultimately not. There’s a decent amount of room to swap here that these two made it safe somewhere. But all this was not meant to divide our hope on the rocks as much as it was to blow the saga up, and blow it out, so that it transformed into an international affair.
Years later, setting things up, for better or worse, makes the zombies – who are rapidly transforming, fast-running, night-blind demons in this world – a bit of an afterthought. Like most ghoulish timelines with zombies, the longer humans live in a desert, the fuller they become when killing and / or capturing the monsters. Then the real threat becomes other people. Those who have lived by their own laws (or their lack thereof) to scrape through and survive. Peninsula is no different in the fact that the real surprise when Jung-seok and his crew arrive in Incheon is not the sinister abundance of zombies, but the actual people who were abandoned in the city and now their own violent , cruel societies have formed. Included – yup – a kind of zombie Thunderdome game in which victims are forced to survive an attack by carnivores.However, Jung-seok not only suffers terrible shrinkage and crawling (played by Kim Min-jae and Koo Kyo-hwan). No, his redemptive fate throws him into the lane of Lee-Jung-hyun’s Min-jung and her daughters (with the eldest, Lee Re’s Joon, a fantastically great driver of the apocalypse). Once everyone, good and bad, once realizes that Jung-seok’s money and coastal contact can mean rescue, it becomes a balls-to-the-wall mix of a shoot-em-up, a heist, and a Fury Road death race. Those looking for a claustrophobic cancer festival like the last movie (as the last one) two movies like Yeon Sang-ho’s animated Seoul Station as the first chapter in this story) may feel overwhelmed by the Peninsula’s scandalous upgrade, but on its own the film is a fun and tumultuous ride through a mayhem minefield.
