My quick rating – 6.8/10. I saw that Colony was directed by Yeon Sang-ho, the guy who made the insanely excellent Train to Busan, so naturally it got bumped straight to the front of my list. Because apparently I have learned nothing about the dangers of having expectations.
The movie begins with a phone call to the police reporting what the caller describes as a bioterror attack. He has injected himself with the pathogen and claims that makes him the only vaccine capable of stopping the outbreak. From there, a biotech conference becomes a very bad place to network when the virus is released, the authorities seal the facility, and Professor Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun) and a small group of survivors find themselves trapped inside with a rapidly mutating army of infected people.
For a two-hour movie, Colony wastes absolutely no time getting to the zombie business. Someone is attacked around the 12-minute mark, and after that, the infected basically become the stars of the movie.
And that is just fine with me.
These aren’t your standard shuffle-around-and-bite-someone zombies. They move fast, contort themselves into increasingly ridiculous shapes, scramble back to their feet like their skeletons are merely a suggestion, and sometimes move with an eerie synchronization that makes them look less like infected humans and more like a particularly pissed-off gymnastics team. The acrobatic movements are impressive, undeniably cool, and occasionally make me wonder if the virus came with a free membership to Cirque du Soleil.
The hive-mind concept works particularly well, while the way the infected continue to evolve gives the movie some strange and unpredictable moments. There were several times when I found myself more interested in what the zombies were going to do next than what was happening to the actual characters. That’s probably not ideal for the humans, but it does make for some entertaining zombie action.
There isn’t a ton of gore considering the premise, but there is plenty of action. The infected are constantly moving, climbing, contorting, attacking, and generally making the building feel like the worst possible place to have attended a meeting.
Jun Ji-hyun makes for a solid hero as Se-jeong, particularly because she relies more on brains than brute force. Unfortunately, Colony doesn’t give her a particularly strong protagonist group around her. The main antagonist and his increasingly bizarre collection of infected easily overshadow the human characters, and once the zombies start doing their thing, they’re difficult competition for anyone.
Yeon Sang-ho‘s direction is outstanding, which brings me to the unavoidable problem: Yeon Sang-ho directed Train to Busan.
It’s a little like what I was just saying about Spielberg and Disclosure Day. Once you’ve made something as excellent as Close Encounters of the Third Kind, every subsequent movie has to fight against your own resume. Sang-ho is now stuck in his own Train to Busan shadow, where every zombie movie he makes is inevitably going to get compared to the movie that put him on the map for so many people.
And Colony isn’t Train to Busan.
I ultimately put it around the same level as Peninsula, but for completely different reasons. Peninsula went bigger and more action-heavy, while Colony has a much stranger, more evolutionary approach to its infected. This one has some seriously cool ideas, some excellent creature work, and sequences that are so bizarre they become difficult not to enjoy.
It’s not the next Train to Busan, but thankfully, it doesn’t need to be. It’s a weird, fast-moving, occasionally bonkers zombie movie with infected people doing things that infected people absolutely should not be physically capable of doing. And that was enough bite for me.
