The Colony - Movie Review

Critics Score - 5 of 10

General Audience Score - 4 of 10

The post-apocalyptic earth movies are often fascinating takes on what possibilities may lie down the line for humanity. To see what’s left of a global catastrophe, to get a writer’s or director’s take on how people are surviving and what life could be like fifty, a hundred or more years from now, those visions have helped produce some incredible moments in cinematic history. Now we get The Colony, a new film about the bleak future of our planet after it’s been destroyed by disease, war and climate change making our current residence uninhabitable. The film combines various elements and inspiration from many others movies, mainly Waterworld, but also Children Of Men, Oblivion, Planet Of The Apes and even Wall-E. But despite gathering inspiration from many sources, the film feels surprisingly uninspired in much of it’s dialogue and writing choices. If you really love yourself some sci-fi, apocalyptic, futuristic movies or seeing things and people soaked in water then you probably won’t be too upset after watching this one, if not, you’ll probably regret your decision to join up with The Colony.

SYNOPSIS - We begin our mostly above ground aquatic adventure with a problematic sequence of confusing clips of a space shuttle pod crashing down into the ocean, the writing onscreen tells us Earth has became uninhabitable and the rich escaped to Kepler. The pod is the Ulysses Two, the second mission to discover if a return to Earth is possible, Blake (Nora Arnezeder) is part of a crew tasked with checking the fertility of the planet, amongst other things. One of the other officers on board, Tucker (Sope Dirisu), is wounded and stays with the ship while Blake goes out to take a look around and gather some data. Before long some mist rolls in and it soon becomes apparent that these two are not alone, they’re attacked by a party most unwelcoming and soon find themselves at the bottom of a well turned into a prison. Eventually the attackers become the attackees and another group of vagabonds break into their camp, some children are kidnapped and taken away to another facility where Blake chases them down and meets Gibson (Iain Glen), a member of the Ulysses One team that is clearly not what he seems to be. This all may sound like an interesting enough premise but the coherence of the film is a real problem as the motivations of characters aren’t always clearly revealed and as middling plot twists and reveals trickle out, things happen that just don’t add up. But it is nice to see a female lead character having that representation in a futuristic, science fiction film which usually caters heavily toward the “man on a mission” trope.

By the time we reach a finale, just like everything else in the film it’s become waterlogged and all our characters should have pruned to the point of looking like a bunch of raisins, we’ve discovered what it looks like when an interesting concept and premise meets a wholly uninspired and generic script. While the film is light on real action scenes, fortunately there’s something vaguely interesting going on and it’s able to sustain a decent pace though it’s hour and forty-five minutes. But because there’s very little momentum being built by the characters and main story, the ending fizzles out like a firework hitting the water before it explodes. The score is very good and adds some nice depth to the dreary mood, blue/grey visuals and constant feeling of dampness the film goes for, which the cinematography and tone are the main things helping the film to find some measure of success. While the acting is certainly decent, it never really works to elevate the weak material of the script and in the end The Colony ends up as just a run of the mill, post-apocalyptic, end of the world film with nothing much to say about anything other than the need for us all to invest in extra water shoes.

SUMMARY - While there’s some specific things about this film like the genre, atmosphere and visual styling that will make it enjoyable for some audiences, there’s really nothing the film does exceedingly well that’ll attract many other audiences. The vast majority of general cinema goers will find their time better spent with any superhero squads, animated friends or action gangs than they will with this water soaked Colony.