The Bullet Train — The Bullet Train (Blu Ray)

Junya Sato’s cult disaster thriller from 1975, The Bullet Train has been released in the UK by Eureka Classics in a deluxe Blu-ray edition with all the bells ‘n’ whistles.

The expression ‘Bullet Train’ has been in the ether recently as a result of David Leitch’s  2022 American movie based on Japanese author Kotaro Isaka’s novel concerning criminal hi-jinx aboard one of the latest high-speed trains that travel along Japan’s Shinkansen rail networks.  Eureka’s release of an unrelated property with the same name may seem opportunistic but actually the two ‘Bullet Trains’ are among the oldest and newest members of a disparate but interconnected group of films stretching back almost sixty years.

Sato’s The Bullet Train concerns the efforts of a group of criminals to extort money from a train corporation through the threat of blowing up one of its bullet trains, the Hikari 109. The high concept that anchors the movie, that if the train travels below a certain speed bombs will be detonated, will of course be familiar to international audiences due to its presence in Jan de Bont’s now-famous thriller, Speed which replaced the train with a Californian transit bus.  Speed’s scripter Graham Yost has claimed Andrei Konchalovsky’s 1985 Runaway Train as his inspiration with the bomb subplot his addition to that movie’s basic idea of an out-of-control locomotive.  Of course, the presence of the minimal speed bomb trigger in both Speed and The Bullet Train may be coincidental but not only the concept but the speed trigger itself (80 kilometres per hour / 50 miles per hour) is identical.

Beyond Runaway Train, The Bullet Train has earlier antecedents, the most important being The Doomsday Flight, a 1966 TV movie scripted by Rod Serling which may be the year zero of the minimal speed trigger plot device.  The aircraft in this movie will explode when it reaches a certain point in its descent. 

The Bullet Train’s kinship with American disaster movies was never an accident. In a filmed interview from 2016 included on the disk as a featurette Sato states that his producers were influenced by the success of The Towering Inferno and Earthquake and reasoned that a Japanese film along their lines would score big with both international and local audiences.  Looking at The Bullet Train with regard to these models is illuminating.  Compared to the American mainstream cycle of ‘70s disaster movies  Sato’s film possesses a certain gravitas and social awareness which allows it to circumvent the inconsequentiality and campiness which so often afflicted those movies,  particularly the Airport series.

The major American disaster film The Bullet Train most resembles, tonally and structurally is Joseph Sargent’s The Taking of Pelham 123 (1974).  Both films are tense, sober, have a similar setting (a New York subway train in ‘Pelham’’s case), give equal emphasis to criminals and negotiators and the major dynamic is not a romantic one as in the case of ‘Speed’ but the terse relationship between the chief criminal and his opposite number among the officials.

What sets The Bullet Train apart from all American movies is the social awareness Sato brings to his project.  As Tetsuo Okita, Ken Takakura is neither a caustic thug like Robert Shaw’s Mr Blue in Pelham, neither is he a grandstanding loon like Dennis Hopper’s Howard Payne in Speed.  Okita is actually the most sympathetic character in the film.  He is a technical wiz and decent salaryman who has fallen on hard times since his business folded.  The movie’s sympathies extend to Okita’s assistants/surrogate sons.

Oshiro is a working-class kid drawn to the city by social disruption and reduced to selling blood.  Koga is a former student radical whose activism has also turned him into an outsider.  In the featurette, Sato states that Okita’s plot is the revenge of the dispossessed, of those unable to take part in Japan’s economic miracle.  This is not to suggest special pleading on Sato’s part but there is an acute awareness of the tragic aspect in how some people resort to crime.  The selfishness and delusion of Okita’s team is recognized but this is paralleled by the awareness of the greed and self-interest behind the train corporation’s motivations and the recklessness and self-defeating violence of the police’s actions.  This social dimension means that The Bullet Train succeeds equally as much as drama as spectacle.  As a spectacle the movie is served well by its meticulous model and miniature work and some of the set pieces (as when an acetylene tank and torch are delivered to the Hikari 109 across a narrow plank from another bullet train running parallel to it) are superb.

At two and a half hours The Bullet Train is as long, sleek and powerful as its titular locomotive.  And yes, that is Sonny (Shinichi) Chiba as the conductor of the Hikari 109.

The Eureka Classics Blu-ray features two versions of Bullet Train. Both presentations are in 1080p from a 2k restoration of the original film elements.  The first version is the original 152-minute Japanese print with optional subtitles and a commentary by Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp. The second version is the Export Cut, here with an English dub.  The Special features are as follows; ‘Off the Rails:  Junya Sato’s Biographers on the Making of ‘The Bullet Train’’ (Film writer Tatsuya Masata and film critic Masaaki Namura discuss the director’s legacy), ‘Tony Rayns on ‘The Bullet Train’’ (The British expert on Asian cinema discusses the movie), ‘Kim Newman on Mad Bombers in Cinema’ (The popular critic gives an account of the subject to camera tracing the theme from ‘The Bullet Train’ backwards through Hitchcock’s ‘Sabotage’ to the genesis of that movie in Joseph Conrad’s novel, ‘The Secret Agent’), ‘Big Movie, Big Panic’ (an Archive Featurette from 2016 showcasing an interview with an elderly but wonderfully spry and lucid Junya Sato).  Finally, there are two contemporary trailers for ‘The Bullet Train’, both apparently mastered from original elements like the feature.

This is a characteristically excellent package from Eureka making an underrated feature film available to English-speaking audiences and delighting fans of Sonny Chiba, Ken Takakura and wider Japanese cinema equally