25-04-2025
'Bullet Train Explosion' Sticks It to Amtrak
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Nothing infuriates me more than Amtrak. Last weekend, as I was purchasing train tickets from New York City to Philadelphia to visit my parents, the National Railroad's insane price fluctuations dropped a $144 price tag for a one-way trip down to $74 just an hour later. Add on Amtrak's frequent delays and cancellations, and you're dealing with what is essentially an unruly airline industry on rails. It absolutely drives me up the wall.
So, when I heard that Netflix's new film, Bullet Train Explosion, is all about Japan's love for the Shinkansen bullet train, I just had to check it out. After all, I was feeling massive train envy from Japan. Before I hit play on Bullet Train Explosion, I finished reading a story in The New York Times about how railway workers 3D-printed a new rest area at Hatsushima station and then assembled it in just six hours. (In the U.S., passengers consider themselves lucky if there are even benches to sit on while they wait.) But even though Bullet Train Explosion seemingly promised that the exact same train I was fawning over was certain to explode, I had a hunch that the train was still the hero of this story.
The first thing you'll notice about Bullet Train Explosion—aside from its kick-ass title—is that it operates a lot like Speed (1994). The plot follows a terrorist who threatens to detonate a bomb on the moving vehicle for ransom, with the caveat that it will explode if the train slows below 100 km/h (roughly 62 mph). The film is a remake of 1975's The Bullet Train, which itself inspired the 1994 action blockbuster with Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. The one difference is that director Shinji Higuchi (Shin Godzilla) was allowed to film parts of Bullet Train Explosion on real JR East Shinkansen trains.
Much of Bullet Train Explosion's early reviews criticized the film as nothing more than a two-hour commercial for JR East. I understand where they're coming from. (Partly.) Our hero, conductor Kazuya Takaichi (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi), is head-over-heels in love with trains. In the very beginning of the film, he tells a tour group of students, 'Although each of us has our own reasons for boarding the Shinkansen, we're all heading in the same direction.' He looks up at the sky with a smile and asks, 'Isn't there something romantic about seeing all those people off?'
If this was Amtrak Train Explosion, feel free to groan away. You can't charge me $144 to travel from New York City to Philadelphia and then convince me that my trip was actually kind of romantic. But this isn't Amtrak. This is the Shinkansen bullet train. It travels from Osaka to Tokyo—a little over 300 miles—in just two and a half hours at speeds reaching 200 mph. Amtrak could never! But the Shinkansen? This train fucking rules. That's why Kazuya, despite being paid a conductor's salary, would give his life to protect this train. Over the course of Bullet Train Explosion's two-hour runtime, Kazuya breaks up fights between the passengers, jumps from one uncoupled car to another, and connects a rescue car while the vehicle is still in motion like he's Dr. David Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey. He is a goddamn Superman for trains.
The one department where Bullet Train Explosion ironically disappoints is that the film doesn't blow up any real trains. That's the Catch-22 of JR East's involvement in the film. If you're filming on real Shinkansen cars, you can't exactly send them flying in a pillar of fire and debris. So, Higuchi employs some shockingly terrible CGI for a film made in 2025. It's possible that the budget for Bullet Train Explosion was no more than the price for all these actors to ride the train.
Still, I'd pay that price easily. There's a fair number of surprises throughout Bullet Train Explosion—even if it's quite insane that none of them are literal explosions. I can't say that it rivals 1975's Bullet Train, and especially not the thrill ride of Speed. But if Bullet Train Explosion is merely a two-hour commercial designed to highlight the Shinkansen and its dedicated crew, then Japan did a fantastic job. I dare the U.S. to create a bullet train as prepared to survive a terrorist attack as the Shinkansen. And if they would like to set that up before I need to travel from New York City to Philadelphia again, I'd very much appreciate it.
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