Now's the perfect time to watch the 50-year-old Japanese thriller that inspired Speed

Netflix's Bullet Train remake is nowhere near as interesting as its empathetic '70s inspiration.

By Jacob Oller  |  April 22, 2025 | 2:00pm
Photo: Toei Company
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The biggest difference between Netflix’s slick new thriller Bullet Train Explosion and the 1975 film The Bullet Train that it’s remaking isn’t the reliance on digital effects. It’s not that the new film includes flashy drone shots, or uses actual Shinkansen units (thanks to the support of the East Japan Railway Company) when filming a bullet train that can’t dip below 100 km/h at risk of onboard bombs detonating. It’s not even that the speed the train must maintain is 20 km/h faster than the original, which is a hilariously meaningless distinction that sums up the modern mentality towards remaking movies: Just crank those rookie numbers up! No, it’s that, in Bullet Train Explosion, nobody will negotiate with terrorists, so the perpetrators who planted the speed-reliant explosives remain distant, inhuman, and inconsequential. It tells a story of disparate groups working in harmony to overcome a faceless threat. In the far superior Bullet Train, understanding who’s behind this potential disaster—those beaten down by corporations and the government—is the only way to stop it.

Junya Sato’s The Bullet Train, which alongside Runaway Train would help form the basis for Jan de Bont’s blistering bus race Speed, itself grew from a bevy of genre influences, namely Hollywood disaster movies like The Towering Inferno, Earthquake, and, of course, Airport. It also grew from a disillusionment around Japan’s booming post-war economy. 

Instead of generating increasingly hilarious melodrama (aside from a devotion to intense zooms, and a few panicking passenger gags that Airplane! would envy), The Bullet Train uses its high-concept plot to empathize with the downtrodden desperates who concocted it. The true villains are the institutions that prioritize profit and positive optics over human life. There’s still a large ensemble of big personalities—including the director of the Shinkansen, the bevy of cops chasing down the perps, the pregnant passenger who goes into labor at full speed, and legendary action star Sonny Chiba dripping with perspiration while driving the train—but the most nuanced characters are the conspirators, led by Tetsuo Okita (Ken Takakura).

Small business owner Okita, whose posse includes former radical students and his own blue-collar co-workers, is a failure. He’s middle-aged, tired, broke, divorced. He’s an unsuitable father figure to both his young son and the employee he’s taken under his wing. Pushed to a place they can no longer tolerate by a country that seems to have left them behind, his crew can only see one option to get what they feel they’re owed from their government. That option just happens to involve the complicated plan of strapping explosives to a train that go off once the train slows down below a certain speed. But despite being sold on the premise of a barreling time bomb, much of The Bullet Train is spent on flashbacks detailing Okita and his team’s radicalization, like another terrorist-sympathetic thriller, How To Blow Up A Pipeline. 

As Japan’s railways centralized, as student movements fractured in the wake of 1960’s U.S.-Japan Security Treaty, and as labor was handed a harsh defeat that same year in the Miike Struggle, many of the country’s lower-income, left-leaning demographics weren’t embraced by what would become known as the Japanese economic miracle. That some of these people might dream up a cockamamie plan to extort the government for funds they feel they’re owed—either because of business losses, unpaid worker’s compensation, or other financial grievances—isn’t so far-fetched. Compared to the heightened villainy on display in Bullet Train Explosion, the motivations in The Bullet Train feel radically humanist.

The film’s meandering plotlines, which move away from the pyrotechnics and towards far stranger scenarios—like cops siccing a local college judo team on a suspect, which leads to a whitewater boat chase—allow The Bullet Train to shift the audience’s sympathies. As those watching learn more about Okita, and become increasingly invested in the plights of those that the police are (violently) hunting down, it becomes clear that despite their threats, the would-be bombers don’t actually want to hurt anyone. They just want to destabilize a system that’s caused them so much pain, then remove themselves from that system by leaving the country. It’s the cops (and to a lesser extent, the government and the train company) who are more invested in publicly punishing the criminals than assuring public safety. From the cynical debates between these groups to a final trap so callous that the upright train director resigns in disgust, The Bullet Train works to undermine whatever preconceived notions its audience entered into the thriller with.

With his co-conspirators picked off, one by one, Okita weathers their deaths with increasing exhaustion and despair. The responsibility for his young, gung-ho teammates sits heavy on Takakura’s face. Heavy-browed and chain-smoking, Takakura’s arc becomes a grim death march. The problem is that, if all the conspirators die, nobody will know how to deal with the bomb aboard the speeding train. 

That leaves The Bullet Train and its heroes in the unenviable position of needing to appeal to its main villain in order to get them all out of a scrape. The fascinating result, speaking to the larger theme of a morally gray antagonist more compassionate towards individuals than to organizations, is that it works. Okita helps defuse the situation he caused in the first place, and (despite the protests of the character with the strongest moral backbone) he’s punished for it by those whose priorities skew the opposite way. 

At a time when the U.S. seems to be dismantling itself from the inside, with suffering doled out en masse by unfeeling and disconnected techno-bureaucrats, the disenchanted atmosphere of The Bullet Train feels far closer to life than the rah-rah blockbuster air of its Netflix remake—or even the exhilarating silliness of its Keanu Reeves-starring progeny. It’s rare for a modern action-thriller to feel wistful, or to make one care about hurt people making bad choices. Those seeking that kind of complex comfort now have the opportunity to look backwards at a film that’s far more grounded and political than those it inspired.

 
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