Bullet Train Explosion is a Japanese action thriller film streaming on Netflix that happens to be a modern-day remake of the 1975 film, The Bullet Train. The plot is centered around the incidents on the Hayabusa No. 60 bullet train that is discovered to have been fitted with multiple bombs after it starts on its usual run from Aomori City to Tokyo, filled with passengers and rail workers. Overall, Bullet Train Explosion has enough intense and grandly shot scenes, along with bits of serious psychological drama, all of which make it quite a thrilling and entertaining experience.
Spoiler Alert
What is the Netflix film about?
Bullet Train Explosion begins with a group of high school students exploring the Shinkansen Rolling Stock Center in Aomori as part of an educational excursion, where they learn about how the high-speed bullet trains operate on a daily basis. One of the conductors who works on the JR East network, Kazuya Takaichi, is the one proudly giving the tour to the children, telling them about the importance of the bullet trains and the sheer level of engineering precision involved with them. As the tour comes to an end, some of the students ask Takaichi why he had decided to become a train conductor instead of a pilot, and the man replies that he finds it really satisfying to tend to everyone’s needs and bring together all passengers and serve them onboard, because of which he is extremely driven and passionate about his job.
A few minutes later, Takaichi walks towards the platform at Aomori station in order to board the Hayabusa 60 Shinkansen, where he is about to serve the duty of the chief conductor, as he has been for quite some time now. His assistant conductor, Keiji Fujii, joins him along the way and even questions how the man remains so motivated in his job. After all, most conductors in Japan Railways, like Fujii himself, are here only to serve a mandatory period on their journey to become pilots, and as Takaichi knows this all too well, he assures Fujii that he will soon write a positive report in his name. The Shinkansen bullet train arrives at the platform, and after Takaichi gives the safety clearance, passengers are allowed to board the coaches.
The group of lively high school students seen earlier are also among the passengers onboard, and the enthusiasm among them about being on such an excursion trip is quite evident, although one of the girls, Yuzuki Onodera, is visibly less excited than the others. In a different coach, a politician named Yuko Kagami is traveling with her associate and is soon identified by a young girl as the face of a recent scandal that had rocked Japan’s political scene. A YouTuber named Mitsuru Todoroki, who is better known by his online handle, The Unemployed Rich Man, is also on the train, traveling to Tokyo, although he prefers keeping his identity hidden for the time being. When the time for departure arrives, Takaichi gives the signal, and the onboard pilot, Chika Matsumoto, drives the train out of the station.
Everything so far proceeds in a routine manner, and so the employees at the JR East Shinkansen operation control center also settle into their usual schedule of overseeing the safe running of the bullet train network. However, the control center is shocked into a state of emergency by a sudden call from the JR East headquarters, where an anonymous message is left by a caller about the presence of multiple bombs on the Hayabusa 60 train. The train will supposedly blow up if its speed dips below 100 kmph, and although the threat is not taken seriously at first, the explosion on a cargo train in a similar manner, confirms that there is indeed reason for fear. The workers at the control center, led by General Commander Yuichi Kasagi, must now figure out how to deal with the emergency before the passengers onboard are killed.
What is the demand made by the bomber?
The anonymous caller who first left the messages about the bombs is quickly revealed to be the bomber themselves, and they soon reveal their demand. The bomber wants 100 billion yen to be transferred to their account, and only then will the bombs be defused. The other catch is, of course, the fact that the bombs will be triggered as soon as the speed of the train drops below 100 kmph, which is why the authorities need to be extra careful. This mechanism is first confirmed when the cargo train is blown up as its speed drops below 5 kmph, right after the bomber mentions it, as a sort of demo display of their skills with explosives. When the higher authorities speaking to the perpetrator express concern at where they are to get hold of such a huge amount of money in a short while, the bomber states a different demand, which is also quite important to the context.
The bomber explains that they want the 100 billion yen from the common citizens of Japan—the common people should pay about 1000 yen per head to a government forum, which would then be transferred to the perpetrator. This would quickly gather the necessary funds, and so there would be no problem in dealing with the situation. But as the representative of the government announces, there is simply no such forum, or the structural means to create one, through which common citizens would pay money to the government for a specific cause. More importantly, the Japanese government has a strict policy of never negotiating with terrorists, and so they refuse to meet the demands of the bomber, no matter how much of a risk doing so would pose to the people onboard the train.
In the course of these events, the news about the bombs on the Hayabusa 60 is revealed to the public, and therefore, to the passengers themselves, which naturally creates quite a bit of panic. The demand made by the bomber is also obviously mentioned, and since the government is unwilling to do anything about it, the YouTuber, Todoroki, decides to use the situation both to gain more followers and also to call out the government’s negligence regarding the matter. Therefore, he uses his social media platform, under the name of The Unemployed Rich Man, to create an online portal to accept funds from the public for the ransom money, and this quickly turns into a success. People donate their share solely to protect the passengers from death, and this is also when the idea of unity first starts to appear in the plot of Bullet Train Explosion.
While initially it does seem like Todoroki would be stealing all this money for himself because of his obnoxious nature, he quickly brings total transparency to the website, making all donations visible to users. By the end of the film, the massive donation amassed is also shown to be intact on the portal, with no amount sneakily siphoned off by Todoroki, and it will most probably be returned to the citizens. But what this act of contribution signifies is the unity among the citizens while helping their fellow countrymen, and this inspires those on the train to act in a similar manner.
Is the man in the mask the real perpetrator?
Right from the moment when the passengers boarded the bullet train, a certain man covering his face at all times seemed rather suspicious, mostly because of his unbothered attitude. When news of the bomb spreads among the passengers, the man still remains unmoved and casually eats his lunch while everyone else is panicking around him. Bullet Train Explosion intentionally presents his actions to make him seem like the real perpetrator, but his real identity is soon revealed by a group of online pranksters. The man in the mask is named Goto, and he had recently gotten into a major fiasco because of a certain accident that had taken place. A tourist helicopter had crashed into a school, causing the death of eight individuals, possibly even some of the schoolchildren, and the aircraft was found to have been poorly maintained.
It was Goto who had been responsible for the maintenance of the helicopter, possibly because it was his tour company that owned it, and so he was naturally booked for negligence. It is suggested that although Goto had not been officially held responsible for the negligence by the law, the masses absolutely hated him for having indirectly caused the crash. Therefore, the man still carries the guilt and shame because of this incident, and this is why he hides his face with a mask at all times. But when some citizens identify Goto from the photos and videos of the passengers circulating online, they refuse to pay the ransom money to save such a man, who, they believe, should have been punished for his negligence instead.
This reveals who Goto is, and it is clear that he is not the bomber, but he still creates a ruckus onboard by demanding that he be allowed to deboard the train somehow. At one point, Goto is even ready to take his own life instead of facing humiliation at the hands of his fellow passengers, and it is the politician, Kagami, who calms him down. Like Goto, Kagami also had recently faced the wrath of the people because of a political scandal that had seemingly been wrongly pinned on her, and so she had learned how to tackle such situations. Therefore, Kagami tells Goto that people forget about scandals as quickly as they rush to blame others, and this makes him decide to give himself another chance.
Who had planted the Bombs, and why?
It is eventually revealed that the bombs on the Hayabusa 60 Shinkansen had been planted by the seemingly unassuming student, Yuzuki Onodera, because of a number of psychological reasons. Yuzuki’s father, Tsutomu Onodera, is a retired veteran police officer who had won multiple accolades for his bravery and service to the force. However, despite his heroics in the professional world, Tsutomu was an abusive coward in his personal life, the brunt of which had to be faced by his helpless young daughter. After her mother passed away, Yuzuki was left all alone with her father, who never showed any love or affection for her and even often expressed that he wished she was a boy instead. This toxic environment at home, where Yuzuki was made to feel unwanted and unloved at all times, eventually made her develop a tremendous hatred for her father, which then made her take certain horrific decisions.
One of the biggest accomplishments in Tsutomu’s professional career had been that he had apparently killed Masaru Koga, one of the perpetrators in a horrific train bombing that took place in 1975. This terrorist attack had also been executed aboard a Shinkansen train, and this incident made up the events of The Bullet Train, the film that is the original and also, in a sense, a predecessor to Bullet Train Explosion. Incidentally, Masaru had blown himself up with a suicide bomber jacket, but the government did not want to reveal this piece of information to its citizens and so had falsely credited Tsutomu for killing the terrorist. This incident, and the rewards that followed, had made Tsutomu extremely arrogant and brash in life, as he always claimed himself to be the hero who saved Japan from terrorists on that day, and his daughter absolutely hated him for this. Therefore, Yuzuki had decided to attack another Shinkansen train as a sort of tribute to her father’s victim, whom she felt was a better man than Tsutomu.
Yuzuki had gotten in touch with Masatoshi Koga, the son of Masaru, on the internet, and they’d soon developed a strong friendship over their mutual hatred for Tsutomu. Masatoshi, who professionally worked as a blaster, decided to help Yuzuki in her plan by designing the specialized bombs for her that would go off when the train would drop its speed. Ultimately, it was Yuzuki’s extreme self-hatred and frustration towards life and the world that led her to plant the bombs on the bullet train. She had never felt love and so believed that nobody cared about whether she lived or died. This is why she gives her co-passengers the chance to save themselves by killing her instead, putting them in an immense moral dilemma.
Yuzuki’s heart has a monitor attached to it, and it has been wired to defuse the bombs if she dies. Despite the immense anger that Takaichi feels towards Yuzuki because she caused the grave injury to his friend, Fujii, he is mature enough to realize that the girl is emotionally broken because of the horrific mistreatment that she had had to face from her father. In a heartwarming act of kindness and forgiveness, Takaichi hugs Yuzuki instead of killing her, making her feel that she too is a victim in the situation, like the others, despite technically being the perpetrator.
How were the passengers finally saved in time?
The rescue operation in Bullet Train Explosion begins right when the operators, led by Kasagi, decide to decouple a few of the coaches and let them explode by moving the passengers into the other coaches. They then also send another bullet train to run parallel to Hayabusa 60 so that the passengers can be moved out of the original train and be rescued from the bomb threat. Most of the passengers can be saved in this way, but 9 individuals, including passengers and onboard workers, remain on the train, which speeds towards Tokyo. At one point, there is an effort to quickly build a link between the tracks at Tokyo station so that the train does not have to be stopped at Tokyo, which would cause the explosion there and kill many more people than just those onboard. However, this construction is halted when the government does not authorize it and questions the jurisdiction of the Shinkansen operators.
In Bullet Train Explosion’s ending, Kasagi comes up with a marvelous plan to get the coach in which the 9 people are currently taking shelter derailed from the outside by switching the tracks. They had earlier figured out that this coach did not have any bombs attached to it, and so when it derailed, the rest of the train kept running straight, gradually losing speed, and eventually exploding over an empty piece of land, meaning that there were no casualties. When the derailed coach comes to a stop and the rescue team enters, they find all 9 individuals to be alive. In the end, the investigating officer shows Yuzuki that the portal started by Todoroki had already received the targeted amount of 100 billion yen, making it evident that there is always hope in unity and togetherness. Yuzuki has to face the legal consequences of her actions, no matter how unfortunate her reasons had been, and she is arrested. Masatoshi had already been picked up by the police, and so both the perpetrators were ultimately punished in the end. Fujii is rushed to the hospital, but the doctors assure Takaichi that he can be saved and there is no threat to his life. Takaichi and Matsumoto, meanwhile, are celebrated by their coworkers and the passengers for their bravery in dealing with the situation.
