Previously posted on blog and written by B. Demeter
The Colony is the kind of film we get when a movie studio hears about a different movie studio making a cool sounding movie.
Snowpiercer is supposed to be a really good climate apocalypse movie (I haven’t seen it yet so I can neither confirm nor deny such allegations, but reviews point to it being awesome). The Colony is a really horrible climate apocalypse movie (This I can confirm).
So the world has ended at the hands of Frosty and the earth has dipped into a new ice age. The surviving humans are scrapping by living under ground in… wait for it… colonies. Brilliant! Supplies are low, depression is high, and everyone is deathly afraid of the common cold.
For some reason Bill Paxton and Laurence Fishburn are in this movie. Go figure.
One day they get a distress signal from a neighboring colony so a few go over to investigate. They find that colony completely decimated by a roving band of cannibals. The group flees. The cannibals follow them back to their colony. Chaos ensues. The surviving members of the colony walk off into the sunset. Roll credits. The end.
This movie is as ‘blah’ as it gets.
Firstly, the film goes out of its way to set up Bill Paxton as the hard-line anti-common cold guy. As soon as a person starts to sniffle his trigger finger gets itchy. But this character development goes nowhere because as soon as the cannibals arrive everything goes shit house. In the end, his character subplot does eat up a few minutes of run time. And it is Bill Paxton after all- it is not just a throw away character, you have to do something with him.
Secondly, in a world with enough things going against humanity’s survival, they really don’t need to write in additional causes for death. As improbable as the cannibals existence is, there was already enough shit going on that could have wiped out the colony. Extreme low temperature. Disease. Internal fighting. Why start piling shit on top of an already full plate? Why not throw in an alien and a few vampires while you’re at it?
Geeze, I’m even having a hard time complaining about this movie. I did nothing for me. I was already looking forward to forgetting it as soon as the credits started rolling. Do yourself a favor and just go watch Snowpiercer like I should have in the first place.
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