So I finally watched this, and this might be the best zombie movies around. The bullet train is a great setting for zombie survival, and they take great advantage of it. Because a train has multiple cars and some strong dividers between them they utilize this to keep the living compartmentalized and the train does stop a couple of times trying to get to a safe city, it ends up splitting the survivors up. They also do some really awesome far away city destruction scenes that are reminiscent of the beginning of the Dawn of the Dead remake, but they do more of them. Like Dawn of the Dead they start off with the collapse showing some very creepy scenes of the disaster happening in the background as our main character and his daughter are driving to the train station. You can tell they are just ahead of the zombie outbreak, but they do not know it. The zombies are fast and move in waves at times like WW Z. Only because of the setting it is not as ridiculous looking. I love how the koreans show the zombie transformations with the zombies just distorting and breaking themselves when they go from living to dead. The zombies are also quite relentless. Even if you hate subtitles the movie should not be dubbed. The acting is just too good and a dub would really ruin it. Not to mention the performance by the little girl is great. The inflections of the voices are really well done and you are going to get more out of their performance in the original language. Also, if you are ever going to watch All of us are Dead on netflix you need to watch this first. They clearly do a lot of homage to this and you will miss some of the humor and references if you do not see this first. I am also pretty sure the guy in the opening of this movie is also the science teacher from all of us are dead. I could be wrong on this, but I could not identify the actor on IMDB.
So just for fun I decided to watch the Dawn of the dead remake which was my favorite zombie movie. It has it's flaws but it was well done. I have to say Train to Busan has taken the number one zombie movie IMO. It is a much tighter movie within it's rules. I think the characters of Dawn of the Dead are more fun, but there is something much more fun about a zombie survival movie without a lot of gunplay. The characters have to think more, and use more of their environment rather than just trying to find the next gun or explosive.
