The Horror Show
The Colony
by Jeff Renfroe
When the future Ice Age has destroyed the entire planet forcing human kind into extinction, the few survivors that remain have to deal with a serious and blood-thirsty threat. Will they make it, or will their inner animal instincts for survival drive them to tear each other apart?
The Colony depicts a world frozen by severe and extreme weather conditions. In this snowy setting, where nothing but snowflakes and wind prevail, a few sporadic underground facilities, looking like industrial warehouses, are set up in order to provide refuge to the remaining humans. The lack of food and medicines makes even the common cold a major problem let alone the deadly threat that will terrorize the last colonists on Earth.
The so-called underground Colonies are the only places where human life exists. Colony 7 is run by former military officer Briggs (Laurence Fishburne), who appears to be a very likeable and highly respected leader. By his side we see Sam (Kevin Zegers), a courageous and honest young man, with a touch of rebellious side. The widely popular cast is completed with Bill Paxton’s character, Mason, a totally obnoxious and irritating man, playing boss and disobeying the Colony’s rules.
The actual story begins when Colony 7 gets a distress call from Colony 5. After losing touch with the fellow colonists, Briggs organizes an expedition to investigate the strange circumstances under which the communication with Colony 5 was lost completely. Recruiting Sam and young Graydon (a secondary character), the three men begin their journey which involves walking for a couple of days under freezing cold temperatures, crossing a snow-covered abyss that used to be a big city.
When they get to Colony 5, what they see goes beyond their imagination. The setting is this: blood everywhere, no signs of human life and strange knockings. What they encounter will soon enough come and get them more vicious and vengeful than ever.
Starting off as an action movie about the severe circumstances under which the exhausted mankind has to survive, trying to keep it together and not lose it, The Colony gradually becomes the horror movie that the fans should expect. There is a moral hidden below the snow and that is that everyone hides an animal ready to be unleashed in extreme survival situations.
The execution is not as sophisticated as it sounds. It is rather superficial, focusing more on a brutal revenge, resembling the ‘I am Legend’ story. There are so many plot holes in there, which are probably the reason for its quite average score. The progress of the movie appears to be so convenient and so predictable that it might get a bit annoying. Consider this a spoiler, but how on earth can anyone trace someone else’s footsteps on the snow after the passing of an entire night, considering the heavy snow never -ever- ever stops? There are a few more questions of this kind which made The Colony a nice, but completely unrealistic, movie that seems to have been not thought through.
The cast is great, though. A few cliché-lines every now and then are absolutely unnecessary and unfortunately they do sound cheesy and silly. The first half of the movie is not that exciting and certainly got me worried that I might not be watching anything that has to do with horror – it was more like a dramatic presentation of a destroyed world and the intrigues of the last remaining humans struggling to fight for survival. But I guarantee that horror found its way into this freezing mess, although I can’t guarantee that it was done successfully.
The plot holes were a big bummer and I can’t be forgiving, given this specific cast deserved more than that. Other than that, if these holes were to be magically excluded from the plot, I’d say it was an quite entertaining choice.
Maria Kriva, HMS
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