When The Earth Froze,
The Rules Of Survival Changed Forever.
Starring: Laurence Fishburne, Bill Paxton, Kevin Zegers, Charlotte Sullivan, Atticus Mitchell
Director: Jeff Renfroe
2013 | 94 Minutes | Not Rated
“Mason, this isn’t right!” – Sam
“This is survival.” – Mason
So, I have a feeling the producers of The Colony hoped that the similar poster design and… errr… weather conditions (?) to Snowpiercer would equal a few confused people renting this rather than waiting for Snowpiercer to finally be released in the U.S. If I’m completely honest, said marketing plan probably worked a bit on me, paired with some decent looking trailers and actors. Will The Colony live up to my heightened expectations? No. No it will not.
The residents of a colony on a post-apocalyptic Earth trek across a frozen wasteland in search of the only other known settlement after having lost communications with them.
First off, I’m just going to say that this movie moves very slowly for about the first 45 minutes or so. Then gets really frickin’ intense… that is until you realize that you’ve seen this scenario before. Many, many times.
Without giving too much away, I will just say that it was something we’ve all seen many times before. If you’ve seen The Crazies, I Am Legend or The Hills Have Eyes the enemies in The Colony will feel REALLY familiar. Is that giving too much away? Ehhh… It’s not that it isn’t presented in a decent way or anything – the production level is plenty high – but after waiting for something original and getting something very unoriginal, it’s hard to really get into the movie.
Even the music feels derivative of the kind of indie tunes heard in 28 Days Later.
On top of the lack of originality, the protagonists of the movie make for another big problem. There just isn’t enough here to care about. Commando’s John Matrix had more character development than the entire cast of characters in The Colony. They’re all just mysterious survivors of the apocalypse, which could definitely work if done right… but doesn’t here.
On the plus side, the special effects do a pretty fantastic job of making this frozen over world a reality. Once in a great while I would notice an iffy bit of effects but those spots are pretty rare. The blood thirsty baddies don’t look original but at the very least they do look good. We live in an amazing time where even bad movies can look this good.
I hesitate to call The Colony a truly bad movie. It really isn’t. I would actually probably love it if I hadn’t seen the same scenario a bunch of times before… many of those times done better. I’d also hesitate to recommend this movie to anyone else. Odds are they have seen this scenario a few times too many as well.
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