The Story Behind Bullet Train Explosion

Trains have been popular in cinema arguably since the beginning of film, when the Lumière brothers’ “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” became one of the first movies ever made and commercially screened in 1896. From the silent Civil War movie The General to Alfred Hitchcock’s suspenseful Strangers on a Train to the quiet romance of Before Sunrise, trains propel narratives across genre and time. For the Japanese filmmaker Shinji Higuchi, an interest in trains on screen dates back to at least 1975, when he saw The Bullet Train as a fourth grader. Fifty years later, it remains one of his favorite films and he has directed its sequel: the action thriller Bullet Train Explosion, out April 23 on Netflix.

Shinji recalls being particularly affected by The Bullet Train’s depiction of Japanese National Railway staff members. In the film’s press notes, he writes, “I liked watching ordinary workers, who had a strong sense of duty to do something about the unbelievable situation, give everything they had to perform their jobs.” 

Speaking with TIME through an interpreter, Shinji says he wanted to make sure to give the original story its due when making the sequel. 

“I really had to grapple with how I wanted to approach the themes that would be depicted in this film,” Shinji says. “It was quite an arduous task for me, and I had to put my all in it.” 

Let’s break down the deep cinematic roots of Bullet Train Explosion, and how Shinji brought one of film’s first subjects into the modern action movie world.

Bullet Train Explosion’s direct inspiration

Netflix’s Bullet Train Explosion is a sequel to 1975’s The Bullet Train, which was directed by Junya Sato and stars Ken Takakura, Sonny Chiba, and Ken Utsui. The original film tells the story of a perilous trip undertaken by Hikari 109, a high-speed, first-generation bullet train traveling from Tokyo to Hakata. Shortly after Hikari 109’s departure, the railway security head is informed that a bomb has been planted. If the train slows below 80 kilometers per hour (roughly 50mph), it will explode. Railway staff and the police work to keep the 1,500 passengers safe, while a $5 million ransom is demanded.

In Bullet Train Explosion, Shinji keeps the same general premise as The Bullet Train, but ups the ante and expands the focus. In the 2025 sequel, the train’s speed can’t dip below 100 kilometers per hour or roughly 62 mph (the train can reach a top speed of 320 kilometers per hour, or roughly 199 mph), and the ransom is a whopping 100 billion yen (roughly $710,360,000). The mysterious ransomer asks the sum to be raised by the general public, depicting a social media culture that moves faster than the fastest of trains. Unlike the 1975 film, which focuses more on? we spend more time with those passengers, which include a scandal-embroiled politician (Machiko Ono), a YouTube celebrity (Jun Kaname), and a gaggle of teenage schoolchildren. On the staff side, train conductor Kazuya Takaichi (Tsuyoshi Kusanagi) is as close to a hero-protagonist as we get in a story about the efficiency of working together.

Shinji’s adoration of both the original film and its depiction of Japanese railway culture shines through in Bullet Train Explosion, which eschews the classic arc of a Hollywood action movie for a Japanese tale of collective problem-solving and the benefits of being good at one’s job. It’s what Spider-Man 2 might have looked like if, instead of Peter Parker stopping a careening “L” train with only his sticky webs and superhuman strength, he was aided by an idealistic train conductor, a sleepy mechanic, and a dedicated team back at the Chicago Transit Authority—and if that was the whole movie.

With Bullet Train Explosion, Shinji also makes an effort to deepen the mechanical realism of the franchise, saying in the film’s press notes that the original movie was criticized for the way it portrayed trains.  “As someone who likes both movies and railroads, I was really upset by this response,” he writes. “So when we started this project, I wanted to make something that wouldn’t face this same criticism. I talked to experts knowledgeable about bullet train designs and researched the actual mechanisms.” 

Unlike the original film, the Netflix production included support from a major Japanese railway company, the East Japan Railway Company. “The [JR East] staff knew about the original film and wanted to show real bullet trains to people around the world,” Shinji explains in the press notes. “This feeling matched well with our intent to show real bullet trains on the screen.” 

When filming on a real-size bullet train carriage was not possible for a scene, Shinji used miniature models. “As much as the budgeting allowed, we would make models that were as big as possible, model trains that would probably fit on maybe two tables,” he tells TIME. “And then we would wreck those models.”

How is Bullet Train Explosion connected to Speed?

If the shared premise of Bullet Train and Bullet Train Explosion sounds familiar, then you’ve probably seen Speed, the 1994 Hollywood action movie classic starring Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock. In it, an LA bus is held hostage by a bomber threatening to blow up the vehicle if it drops below 50 mph (80 kilometers per hour), or if a ransom of $3.7 million isn’t paid. The 20th Century Fox film was the fifth highest-grossing film of 1994, and had a 1997 sequel. 

It seems hard to believe, but there is no direct connection between 1975’s The Bullet Train and 1994’s Speed. Speed screenwriter Graham Yost has gone on record saying the idea for Speed came from a 1985 American film called The Runaway Train. The film was recommended to Yost by his father, Elwy Yost, a Canadian TV personality who hosted TVOntario’s Saturday Night at the Movies from 1974 to 1999. The Runaway Train was directed by Andrei Konchalovsky and stars Jon Voight and Eric Roberts as two incarcerated men who escape prison only to end up on a train without brakes, careening across the frozen Alaskan wilderness.

The plot thickens because Runaway Train was based on an original screenplay from Japanese film legend Akira Kurosawa, known for medium-defining works such as Rashomon and Seven Samurai. In the 1960s, Kurosawa wrote a script, alongside frequent collaborators Hideo Oguni and Ryūzō Kikushima, about a runaway train. Kurosawa was set to direct the international co-production in New York in late 1966, but shooting was canceled at the last minute due to difficulties with American financial backers. The script would be used for Runaway Train two decades later. 

Shinji notes that a 1966 American TV movie called The Doomsday Flight was an inspiration for 1975’s The Bullet Train. Written by Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, the film follows an airliner threatened by a bomb that will detonate if the plane drops below 4,000 feet. The Doomsday Flight was very popular. When it aired on NBC in December 1966, it became the most-watched TV film ever, up to that point.

A Japanese movie for global audiences

“I love bullet train carriages, so I regard the bullet train as a star in my film,” says Shinji. “How to aesthetically approach shooting the bullet train was very important to me.” From the perspective of someone living in the U.S.—where we’re still waiting for the launch of our next generation of high-speed trains, initially planned for 2021—the trains and train culture depicted in Bullet Train Explosion can feel like a science fiction film.

Shinji notes that the celebration of efficiency and teamwork is something that exists in the 1975 film. “It is [a theme] that we also aspire after [in Bullet Train Explosion]: people who are diligent, people who follow the rules, and people in uniform,” says Shinji. “Maybe it’s a very Japanese thing. Maybe the youngsters now are a bit different, but for boys of our generation, there was something wonderful about looking towards the same goal and growing up.”