YMMV / Peninsula

• Esoteric Happy Ending: Jung-seok and Min-jung and her daughters may have been saved by a UN escort, but they will still undergo heavy prejudice as "those from the Peninsula" and it is not known if they will even be granted refugee status by any country.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Korean refugees are subjected to prejudice, hate attacks, and racism due to being potential carriers of the virus. As this movie was released in the middle of the 2020 Coronavirus pandemic, hate attacks and xenophobia against Asians have increased for similar reasons.
• So Okay, It's Average: Many felt that despite not living up to the quality of its predecessor, it's still a serviceable action flick that expanded on the theme from the previous installment.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • It bears quite a few similarities to The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II
  • For having a premise of a heist film set during a Zombie Apocalypse, it's maybe the closest equivalent to Zack Snyder's Army of the Dead, which would release almost a year after this movie. Yeon Sang-ho has confirmed taking inspiration from Snyder's own Dawn of the Dead for Train to Busan, so it all rather amusingly comes full circle.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • North Korea and South Korea are said to have undergone reunification during the initial zombie crisis. This is only mentioned in a throwaway line in the beginning of the movie and is not elaborated further.
  • During the four years that have passed since Train to Busan, the entire Korean peninsula – which includes both North Korea and South Korea – has been abandoned and deserted. Aside from the brief talk show interview in the beginning with mentions of Korean reunification and other countries rejecting Korean refugees, nothing is brought up about the worldwide ramifications of the collapse of one of the most developed countries in the world and one of the most infamous authoritarian dictatorships in recent history.

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