The Colony, starring Laurence Fishburne, Kevin Zegers, Bill Paxton, and Charlotte Sullivan, takes place in the near future. In an attempt to combat global warming, massive weather control towers were built. Predictably, this fails spectacularly, pushing Earth into a new Ice Age. Fishburne leads a group of survivors, living in an underground bunker. If you think this is starting to sound like Snowpiercer, you're partially right. However, Snowpiercer for all its flaws, attempts to use a fairly straightforward story to examine interesting themes of class, politics and economics. The Colony, on the other hand, is a mishmash of characters and plots from dozens of other movies with nothing original to add.
It starts off promisingly enough as we learn about life in Colony 7. There is care taken to establish the world, enough so that it is believable. Unfortunately the same care was not taken with the characters or the plot. All of the characters are cliches with a single characteristic. We have the protagonist (Zegers) haunted by the death of mother and sister years before. Fishburne is the wise patriarch trying to enforce who lives by a code of honor. Paxton is his second-in-command who thinks Fishbrune is too soft and wants to execute sick people (sickness is an ever-present threat in the closed environment of the Colony). Sullivan is the love-interest and keeper of the supplies, although why it's her is never made clear. It's not that the acting is bad; it's just that these characters have all been seen before. They each have one defining characteristic and never develop beyond doing exactly what we expect of them the moment they show up on-screen.
When contact is lost with the nearby Colony 7, Fishburne, Zegers and a teenager with "expendable" written all over him head out to investigate. It is here that the plot collapses. A group of feral marauders has destroyed Colony 7. How these people survived in what we see is a frozen wasteland for years is unclear. And, since they do nothing but scream they are completely characterless. Even after Fishburne sacrifices himself to blow up the only bridge between the two colonies, the marauders somehow manage to follow Zeger back to Colony 5. This leads to an ending cribbed from the conclusion of Aliens (with some 28 Days Later thrown in) with cannibals substituting for xenomorphs as they attack through the Colony's air vents. It ends with the handful of survivors walking into the wasteland, toward what my be an area that has begun to thaw out. Actually, I like the ambiguous ending; this movie didn't descend into complete silliness with a happy conclusion.
It is clear that the creative team wanted to make a good movie. The problem is that they spent more effort on developing a world than they did the characters or the story. It appears they just regurgitated what they've seen in other, better films. This is getting the storytelling process backwards. An audience will accept a sketchy background if the characters are strong, the plot engaging, and an original story is told. If this is not done, as is the case with The Colony, no amount of background or world building will help.
It's a pity, really. The movie looks good, has a decent cast, and some thought was put into designing the world. However, the lazy characterization, the unfortunate decision to include generic marauders as the big threat and the hackneyed plot all conspire to make this film marginally entertaining at best. If you can catch it on Netflix (or a similar service) and have some time to kill, there are certainly worse movies to watch. That's the best recommendation I can give it.
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