#Alive Review – Locked up and isolated with a Zombie Twist
Today we do a review for #Alive which is now streaming on Netflix. The film was directed by Cho Il-hyung and stars Yoo Ah-in and Park Shin-hye. This flick was based on the 2019 script Alone by Matt Naylor, who co-adapted his script with Cho.
The movie, for me, was more scary with the premise rather than the actual moments with the zombies. It played with my fear of being alone and THEN and only THEN does shit hit the figurative fan.
This scared me too because what if it was my wife and kid stuck in the house and we’re so far apart when this happens. How do I get back to them? Where do I start on the journey to get to them? So much anxiety and fear. Or what if the COVID-19 “vaccine” is actually what really triggers the zombie apocalypse? Or what if COVID mutates into something that turns us into zombies.
Check out the trailer for #Alive below:
I got to hand it to the production team and the cast (mainly Yoo Ah-in) for doing a great job in the film. Here’s the thing though, I’ve read comments online saying that its better than Train to Busan (a big heh) which I would disagree but I can agree that it gets some of that zombie flick’s bloodlust.
And while the zombie’s are scary, they hardly really matter and they are just backdrop. To be honest, the only real times the zombies really really matter (other than as fodder and generic threat) is towards the end when the pair of Oh Joon-woo and Kim Yoo-bin reach the eighth floor of the buildings in their complex. The other one was that tense moment involving a zombie and a rope.
I like that what little screen time Park Shin-hye had, she made good use of it. She went and gave us a rollercoaster of emotions too for that, this already has high marks for me. Its rare to get a Korean film that does that in such a short amount of time. Plus her introduction in the story was pretty neat.
I also liked/loathed the idea of how gradually this turned into a possible horror scenario. It could have happened to anyway and it raises the paranoia to the next level.
In terms of negative stuff for this #Alive review, I have to say that it definitely feels like we could have had a teensy bit more world building. I know that they wanted to focus more on the story and the protagonist but it wouldn’t hurt that they did a little bit more to explain why this happened and how it ends.
And sorry, but the film tends to feel more like a survival horror game at some points; helps to make for great tension-filled moments but sometimes it goes lacking.
#Alive – 9/10
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