Colony, The (2012) [Blu-ray]
Action | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Tagline: When the earth froze, the rules of survival changed forever.

Laurence Fishburne (The Matrix), Bill Paxton (Aliens) and Kevin Zegers (Dawn of the Dead), headline an all-star cast in this savage and unrelenting thriller about mankind's greatest enemy: himself. As an endless winter engulfs Earth, humans struggle to survive in remote underground outposts. When Colony 7 receives a distress call from a nearby settlement, Sam (Zegers) and Briggs (Fishburne) race through the snow on a dangerous rescue mission. What they find at the desolate base could mean mankind's salvation... or its total annihilation. Terrifying discoveries will unfold that will change the rules of survival forever.

Storyline: Forced underground by the next ice age, a struggling outpost of survivors must fight to preserve humanity against a threat even more savage than nature.

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Michael Reuben on October 14, 2013 -- Despite impressive production values and the presence of stars Laurence Fishburne and Bill Paxton, The Colony was poorly received in its native Canada in April 2013 and fared even worse during a brief tour in U.S. theaters the following September. It would be easy to explain the film's failure, as some critics did, by dismissing dystopian sci-fi thrillers as an exhausted genre. Imagining humanity's bleak future is a vein that has been thoroughly mined. If one is going to stake a new claim, there had better be more to show for the effort than a few fragments left over from earlier prospectors. Unfortunately, the script, from an original story by Patrick Tarr and Pascal Trottier, revised by director Jeff Renfroe and Svet Rouskov, borrows shamelessly from earlier, better sources, leaving the viewer with a permanent sense of déjà vu throughout The Colony's running time.

(Spoiler alert: In order to provide an overview of The Colony, the following discussion reveals a few plot points. Any reader who wishes to see the film "cold" should skip this section.)

In 2045, the earth is a snow-covered wasteland, in part as a result of a failed experiment in weather control. The ruins of massive control towers can be made out in the snow, along with remnants of cities, bridges and other wreckage of civilization. Small groups of survivors have gathered in shelters adapted from abandoned structures, where they live in constant peril from the ravages of common diseases such as the flu, because medical supplies have been exhausted.

Colony 7 was established in a bunker under the command of Briggs (Fishburne), a former military officer who saw too much savagery in the last days of the old civilization and is determined to run Colony 7 as humanely as possible. When a resident of the colony becomes ill, he or she is placed in quarantine and given an opportunity to recover. If no recovery occurs (and it never does), the patient is offered a choice between suicide by walking into the freezing wilderness or a quick death by bullet.

Briggs' former subordinate, Mason (Paxton), is weary of such niceties. In an early sequence, he makes a colonist's choice for him, to the horror of a young Sam (Kevin Zegers), an orphan who works in the science labs and considers Briggs a surrogate father. The labs are the heart of Colony 7. There the colonists work at preserving seeds of as many species of fruits and vegetables as possible, in case the sun ever reappears and melts the snow. They're also trying to sustain a few domestic animals, like chickens and rabbits, with increasingly little success.

An argument between Briggs and Mason over Mason's methods is interrupted by a distress call from Colony 5. Briggs, Sam and another young colonist named Graydon (Atticus Dean Mitchell) undertake the hazardous journey on foot to the former factory buried under the snow where Colony 5 resides and discover that it has been invaded by an entirely different group of survivors: a roving band of vicious, feral humans who have turned to murder and cannibalism. Anyone familiar with Joss Whedon's Serenity will recognize them as a cut-rate version of that story's Reavers.

The attackers found Colony 5 when it sent scouts looking for the source of a transmission from people who claimed to have repaired a weather control station and opened a hole for the sun to penetrate earth's cloud cover. The scouts were attacked and fled back to Colony 5, with the attackers in hot pursuit. Now, they trail the rescue party back to Colony 7, despite the rescuers' heroic attempts, first, to contain them and then to cut them off. Will Colony 7 survive and, if so, can the colonists get their precious seeds to a patch of sunlight that will make them grow?

Borrowing liberally from every zombie franchise ever created, including the promise of a distant oasis familiar from the Resident Evil series and 28 Days Later, Renfroe and his team also plunder elements from Aliens, the aforementioned Serenity, Terminator Salvation and The Day After Tomorrow. Even the chilly sensation cast over the entire movie by cinematographer Pierre Gill is reminiscent of a similar effect achieved (with more traditional means) by Dean Cundey in John Carpenter's The Thing.

The most original element in The Colony is the visual depiction of Colony 7, because the filmmakers gained access to a recently decommissioned NORAD base in Ontario. Built deep inside a mountain, the base offered huge tunnels and cavernous chambers that provided instant production value. The early scenes inside Colony 7 are the film's best simply because they are set inside a world that's visually intriguing and that your eye can tell has not been created primarily in the digital domain. These are also the scenes devoted to exploring the colonists' survival strategies and the romantic relationship, such as it is, between Sam and Kai (Charlotte Sullivan), the guardian of the colony's supplies. It is Kai who Briggs leaves in charge when he leads the rescue mission to Colony 5, much to the annoyance of Mason, but the conflict is never fully developed.

The Colony is a perfectly harmless way to pass an afternoon or evening, but it's instantly forgettable and doesn't bear rewatching, despite a solid Blu-ray treatment. A rental is all it's worth, and even then expectations should kept low.

Trivia:------------

[CSW] -2.4- When you try to mix apocalyptic survival with science fiction and zombie horror without an exceedingly good script, you end up with a mish-mash that doesn't quite work on any of those levels. That's what this film is. This is a made for television movie that you would expect to see on the Syfy channel not a fully length feature film. It starts out as a slow burner of an apocalyptic survival story, but it is not well-made enough to be atmospheric. Then in mid-story it changes into a zombie horror flick. If you set your expectations very low then renting this movie won't be too much of a disappointment. However it might be better for you to wait for it to come on TV.
[V4.5-A4.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box.



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