Review of The Colony (2013) by Dumeril7 — 02 Jan 2014

Actually, the harsh critics are exactly right on this one. It's unoriginal, contrived, and worst of all, it makes no sense. On the positive side, it's good looking the cinematography and and special effects are well down.

It has a better acting cast than it deserves. The problem is that it has holes in the plot you could drive a truck through and it develops a bunch of subplots that ultimately go nowhere and just detract from the story.

(SPOILER ALERT) Some examples: 1) The explanation for how "feral people" doesn't stand up to logic: The world has a long history of starving people and they've never turned into what these people turn into.

2) Why are common sicknesses all of a sudden so deadly? I know they're in a closed environment, but people live on ships and in the arctic today and common illnesses aren't nearly the grave danger they make them out to be in this movie.

3) The whole power struggle between Mason and the rest of the crew gets a bunch of screen time but ultimately fizzles out, failing to advance the story, set up a key plot element, or add drama. 4) The feral people follow our hero back to his colony by following his footprints in constant wind and snow which would obliterate those footprint in a matter of hours.

5) When the hero grabs seeds to take to the thaw-out zone to re-seed the earth, he grabs a couple jars! There are many, many others. Frankly, it feels like this film started out with a significantly different story and it got a half-baked rewrite in the middle.

Perhaps it was originally a zombie movie then a lot of what is in the film makes more sense. But as it stands, it's just a pretty mess.