‘Bullet Train’ and The Empty World
It’s a common mistake in action stories: The convenient lack of bystanders.
I knew going in that Bullet Train was going to be terrible1. Everything about the film, from the trailers to the reviews, made that pretty clear. And it is terrible! It feels very much like a film that was greenlit back in the 1990s shortly after Pulp Fiction made a splash, despite the fact that’s it’s adapted from the novel Maria Beetle by Kōtarō Isaka, published in 20102. It has that ultra-styled, loopy timeline energy you saw in just about every film made in Pulp Fiction’s wake for a few years, when everyone was trying to get that Tarantino-cum-sardonic-assassins vibe3.
Still, I have the self-confidence to admit that I kind of enjoyed the film4. The performances are fun, for one thing, and at a certain point the filmmakers made what I can only assume was a purposeful, conscious decision to set their story in a world with very, very different physics than ours. Once you accept this, you have a bit of a blast watching this lumbering dumb terrible movie.
The plot gets unnecessarily complex, but it boils down to an assassin code-named Ladybug (Brad Pitt5) taking a last-minute gig to retrieve a case from a bullet train in Japan and stumbling into a complicated web of other assassins who are all on the train for what they think are different reasons but turn out to be the same reason. That’s really all you need to know about the story, which gets incredibly complicated incredibly quickly (there’s even a flashback backstory for a bottle of water, which probably seemed like a genius joke when the producers were sitting around a mountain of cocaine on some private island somewhere).
Like most modern action films, the action here is pretty incoherent, communicated via quick edits, overly choreographed fight moves, and slow motion set to dramatic music. But that didn’t bother me as much as another bit of bad writing you see way too often: All those empty train cars.
Ghost World
The universe of Bullet Train is not realistic—this is one of those universes where assassins all have weird code-names and teenage girls are somehow criminal masterminds, where magical snake venom kills people within a minute or two but an anti-venom exists that leaves the victim completely unaffected and ready to keep fighting. But like many films set in such universes it makes some effort in the early going to convince you that it exists in something similar to the real world. For example, the train station is filled with people, and the train itself is shown to be packed with passengers (as many critics noted, many, many of these passengers are clearly American, which is just kind of weird for a bullet train in Japan, but then the whole story is basically whitewashed so it’s not too surprising6).
And yet, magically, when the time comes for a fight between skilled, desperate assassins, somehow either none of the other passengers notice, or the train becomes instantly and thoroughly depopulated7.
This is a pretty common trope in action films when the setting is a public place crowded with people—and once you notice how empty everything gets every time a fight breaks out, you can’t un-notice it for the rest of your natural life. Obviously, you can’t have the civilians getting alarmed and calling the authorities or getting involved, but on the other hand you want your badass assassin characters to have a fight that unspools like a bloody ballet. The easy solution is to have the fight in a mysteriously empty area. In Bullet Train, there are several fights that take place on a crowded train where there are vast stretches of completely empty areas. If you have ever traveled via train in your life you know this is basically impossible8.
Worse, there are also fights that are interrupted by people, and the film uses the hoary old trope of the Sudden Cessation of Hostilities—you know, someone walks in, the two combatants stop fighting and act casual, and somehow the interloper never notices the blood and bruises, the broken crockery, the stink of sour adrenaline. Then the person moves on, the fight resumes, and somehow no one ever hears a thing despite the fact that two 200-pound men are trying to murder each other in the next room.
A Quickly Dissolving Universe
The filmmakers appear to have realized just how ridiculous this is about three-quarters of the way through, because they explain, via a throwaway line, that the Big Bad has bought all the tickets on the train for the final leg of its journey so he can come on board with a horde of henchpeople to complete his business. This doesn’t entirely make sense if you consider how buying tickets on a train actually works, but at least it hints that the folks involved in this film slowly began to realize how silly it was all getting—by this point there are multiple corpses posed as sleeping passengers, and yet no one—not a single other passenger or employee—has noticed9.
But this also signals the suspension of most of the laws of reality or physics. Sometimes a story simply gets too bound up in its own looping twists, and the only way to cut through it all is to pretend that stuff like gravity doesn’t work the way it actually works. This is just an extension of the attitude that allows a writer to simply delete inconvenient background people whenever a fight needs to go unnoticed—you’re just deleting the rules of reality as needed10. So not only is a professional killer with zero training or experience able to get the bullet train moving, but when it inevitably crashes at tremendous speed with Brad Pitt at the front of the train, he not only survives, but manages to sail elegantly through the wreckage and land without a scratch11.
Clearly, someone thought this was solid storytelling. But, of course, it isn’t; when creating fictional universes you have to respect the limitations of that universe. If your fictional universe is meant to be somewhat realistic, you have to find clever ways to explain how your assassins can have loud bloody fights without being noticed, or how they survive their snake venom poisonings, or how they manage to limp away from a train that derailed while going 200 miles per hour12. Simply deleting people and laws of physics works in the sense of allowing you to just skip on to the next fight, but it sure doesn’t make for a very good or believable story.
Then again, in my own fiction characters are able to drink bourbon more or less constantly and never seem to suffer a hangover, so maybe I should consider this glass house I’m in13.
Next week: Emily in Paris. Again.
The number of things I have done despite knowing they will be terrible is concerning. I really think I need to reevaluate my approach to life.
I think it’s possible we’re just now getting a generation of filmmakers who have been itching to make their own version of Pulp Fiction ever since seeing it when they were 13 years old.
There’s also a whiff of John Wick in the film, what with the whole secret-world-of-colorful-assassins riff, but then what film doesn’t have a whiff of John Wick these days?
I actually have a stupid level of self-confidence. On the one hand, this is due to gender and upbringing, as I was raised to believe that even when I’m wrong I’m doing better than most. On the other hand, this is due to my general level of stupidity, which is very high. See? Even when it comes to being stupid I stupidly and confidently believe I am the best. Wait, is STUPIDLY AND CONFIDENTLY the title of my memoir? Why not!
The weird thing about Pitt is that he’s effortlessly charming and attractive on screen, but if he sat next to you on a bus you would get up and change seats.
These decisions are weird. For example, at one point a pair of assassins are bickering in the quiet car, and an old lady keeps turning around to sternly shush them. Ha ha! How droll. But the old lady is a white American type—a Karen, I suppose—for no reason. Why couldn’t she be Japanese? It’s a mystery. I mean, you could get past the multi-ethnic cast, I think, because a group of international assassins would hail from all over the globe. But then make all of the other passengers Japanese because it’s set in Japan, you know? Clearly Hollywood needs to start running scripts by me.
If I roll over in bed at night, The Duchess is wide awake and demanding to know what’s happening, so the idea that someone could be having a life-and-death struggle in the next train car and I wouldn’t notice seems ludicrous.
Seriously—everywhere you go on a train there is a weirdo leaning against a wall or hovering between cars or just endlessly walking up and down the aisles. Trains are weird places.
I love it when Hollywood imagines that corpses are relatively clean and easily managed things instead of leaking sacks of biowaste that begin decomposing horrifically quickly after death. Weekend at Bernies lied to all of us.
I have an acquaintance who regularly complains that you can tell when the writer’s room or a SFF TV show is staffed with people who don’t actually read or watch sci-fi or fantasy stories, because their assumption is always “it’s magic, so anything can happen.” They are … not wrong. You can spot those shows from a mile away.
As a man who manages to crash into every single thing in the house when he’s sneaking in at 2AM and trying not to wake The Duchess, it offends me that Brad Pitt thinks he can be in a train crash and not hit a damn thing as he’s thrown about the cars.
But don’t get too clever, or we wind up with a middle aged Indiana Jones being hurled through the air inside a refrigerator by an atomic explosion and surviving without a scratch.
As any experienced drinker will tell you, the secret to this is to simply never stop drinking bourbon. The hangover can’t catch you if you don’t stop running.
"The stink of sour adrenaline" might have been my high school prom theme.
I'm going to start using Henchpeople as the file name for all clients.