Director: Shinji Higuchi
Writers: Kazuhiro Nakagawa, Norichika Ōba
Stars: Tsuyoshi Kusanagi, Kanata Hosoda, Jun Kaname
Synopsis: Tension mounts aboard the Tohoku Shinkansen Hayabusa No. 60, bound for Tokyo, where a bomb is rigged to instantly detonate if the train’s speed drops below 100 km/h. As panic grips the passengers following the announcement of conductor Takaichi, the crew, passengers, and the Shinkansen General Operation Control Center race against time to avert disaster.
If you’ve seen Jan de Bont’s Speed, chances are you didn’t know that Junya Satō’s 1975 classic The Bullet Train was the precursor to such a movie, where a simple premise (in this case, a bomb planted in a high-speed bullet train that is set to explode automatically if it slows down below a certain pace) delivered high-stakes, non-stop thrills. Its revolutionary use of miniatures to visualize moments of pure, agonizing terror, as the train continues to encounter bumps while unable to slow down, still holds up to this day as a significant example of creativity that we seldom see in the filmmaking sphere anymore.
The funny thing about the film is that the miniatures are incredibly obvious, so much so that it breaks our suspension of disbelief. Yet, we become so riveted by Satō’s precise employment of crash-zooms and whip-pans to establish palpable, textured suspense in its sequences of walking-and-talking as a revolving door of characters attempt to defuse the bomb that we completely buy into the artifice of it all. That’s because Satō spends a good amount of his runtime giving personality and a tragic, urgent backstory to the antagonist, Tetsuo Okita, played by Ken Takakura, one of the great actors of Japanese genre cinema.
The final shot, while logical in its development and building up to its natural conclusion, acts like a true shock to the system. The frame turns pink and immediately slows down, giving the police the victory they wanted in apprehending the criminal responsible for such an ordeal. However, to the audience, such a denouement could’ve been prevented, and likely would’ve prevented unnecessary suffering. It’s an image that’s stuck with me ever since I saw the original, which is used as the foundation for Shin Godzilla co-director Shinji Higuchi’s Bullet Train Explosion, releasing on Netflix this week.
Part remake and reboot, this repurposed story for contemporary sensibilities stays excitingly tense and kinetic from the moment characters learn a bomb has been planted on the Tohoku Shinkansen Hayabusa No. 60. A key scene from the original film is modernized, as the bullet train must avoid clashing with another locomotive without slowing down, and its impact is much more visceral and intense than in Satō’s picture. Gone are the miniatures, we now have expensive CGI visualizing massive, larger-than-life explosions and crashes that are so death-defying it looks like a thrill ride plucked straight from the depths of Hell. Whereas the 1975 film had more realistic action based entirely on mounting tension, Higuchi’s reimagining is more explosive, and cartoonishly over-the-top.
It simultaneously acts as a feature, especially when adrenaline-fueled scenes inside the train exaggerate the sense of tension at play to ridiculously silly heights, and a bug, when explosions are unrealistically large and defy all laws of physics. However, I’d be lying if I said none of it is terrifically entertaining, even if the reliance on CGI to craft the exterior sequences lacks the artistry of miniatures, where the limitless imagination of the director made us forget we were watching entirely plastic creations, as chintzy as it may look to viewers who have no sense of creating strong images with their mind.
That said, Higuchi is a smart enough filmmaker to at least prime us that this film is more digital than its analog predecessor, with its stacked cast of characters consistently “plugged in” on their devices and eventually utilizing them to document what’s happening in the train, while the political establishment attempts a diplomatic solution to end the bomb instead of acquiescing to the perpetrator’s demands. The social commentary doesn’t break any new ground, but it’s executed well enough that we do ultimately become invested in the large number of people who populate both the internal (on the train) and external (outside the train) conflict of the story.
However, Bullet Train Explosion eventually loses steam (pun absolutely intended) when it reveals the identity of the bomber. I will not spoil it in this review, but let’s just say that the differences are night and day between this version and the original, which spent more than half of its hefty 152-minute runtime to develop our connection with the antagonist, making the final shot all the more heartbreaking, despite the array of bad decisions he makes. Bullet Train Explosion is slightly leaner than The Bullet Train and doesn’t spend a good amount of the runtime on flashbacks, which could be a good thing if focused solely on the meat-and-potatoes of its primary story. Yet, it also barely develops the villain, despite a shocking moment introducing us to the character that could’ve worked in its favor, but isn’t at all fleshed out to its fullest potential.
From there, my interest in the film shockingly dwindled, because Higuchi doesn’t give us the same attention that Satō gave when creating a layered and complex villain that wasn’t simply a mindless terrorist who wanted to blow up a train. He had his reasons, and we completely understood his side of the story by the time we’re caught up to speed (this review contains many train puns for a reason) on his perspective. In Bullet Train Explosion, we have the motivations, but they’re so paper-thin that it won’t take long for you to unplug as it reaches a generic, paint-by-numbers climax with little to no emotional stakes for us to hold onto, despite well-mounted action scenes that are always a shot in the arm with adrenaline.
And then, the movie suddenly ends, without a final shot that’ll live in your retina forever, despite Higuchi’s gift at image-making, as illustrated in Shin Ultraman and his incredible short film Giant God Warrior Appears in Tokyo. It’s a rather unceremonious way to conclude a pretty agreeable time at the movies, despite its obvious inconsistencies dampening the enjoyment significantly. Truth be told, I never expected the movie to be as good as Satō’s original. However, I didn’t expect to feel completely indifferent by the time the credits rolled, despite having a good time in its opening sections with the bevy of thrills and mordant humor Higuchi offered, until it was completely nonexistent by the time it reached its climax. I won’t remember it by the time I’ve finished writing this review, while I may think about the final shot of The Bullet Train for the rest of my life…
