Colony is somehow both underwritten and over-plotted, though sporadically clever. Image: Wikimedia Commons
The action unfolds inside a massive office tower in the middle of a densely populated city, when a disgruntled scientist launches a bioterror attack during a seminar conducted by his former partner.
A sporadically clever but ultimately convoluted affair, Colony is somehow both underwritten and over-plotted. The Korean horror-thriller marks a long-awaited return to the zombie genre for director Yeon Sang-ho, who broke out internationally almost exactly a decade ago with the clutter-breaking horror hit Train to Busan. That film took a deceptively simple premise, injected it with some old-fashioned melodrama, and managed to appeal both to Western and Asian sensibilities.
In the subsequent decade, Yeon has remained highly sought-after, having directed several movies and as many as three Netflix shows. With Colony, he returns to his roots, armed with a bigger budget, seemingly brighter ideas, and a significantly larger canvas to splatter with gore and other grimy fluids.
The action unfolds inside a massive office tower in the middle of a densely populated city. A disgruntled scientist launches a bioterror attack during a seminar conducted by his former partner, a hot-shot CEO against whom the scientist has an axe to grind. The scientist isn’t some meek middle manager; he’s a suave Bond villain, wearing a snazzy jacket and bespoke frames, looking like a Korean Clavicular (American influencer Braden Eric Peters). Before carrying out the attack, he injects himself with the antidote, essentially turning himself into a human vaccine. No harm must come to him, the movie establishes, during the ensuing chaos.
Zombies with special powers
Unlike Train to Busan, or, for that matter, most zombie movies of this kind, Colony lacks a beating heart behind the brain rot. There is no devoted father to root for, no single mother to side with. Instead, the movie introduces around half a dozen characters in the first ten minutes and shrugs indifferently when asked to explain who’s who. Before you can create a character map of sorts in your mind, several people will likely have fallen prey to the virus.
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It spreads like most zombie movie viruses do, by a big bite to the neck region. The zombies move with ferocious speed, on all fours, like panthers on the prowl. In an effort to set these undead apart from the scores of others that infect our screens on a yearly basis, Yeon has given them special powers. They can evolve over time, and with every Pokémon-like evolution, they become more formidable. One character, ostensibly the film’s protagonist, compares them to ants.
The zombies move in large groups, seemingly connected by a singular brain. This ties in with the film’s primary theme: collective action. Like the recent Steven Spielberg movie Disclosure Day, Colony is riddled with post-pandemic anxieties. While Spielberg’s spectacular movie investigated our loss of empathy in the years following the Covid pandemic (2020-23), Colony underlines how individualistic we’ve become, according to the filmmaker.
“Think twice before helping others,” one character instructs another, after they’ve both just witnessed what can happen when someone plays the hero. The first person to die is someone you could imagine getting behind. He had a young daughter and a loving wife at home; he was even planning a major career move. It’s bold of Yeon to do away with this person in the first act. But he’s like a magician with just one trick up his sleeve; after killing off this would-be hero, Yeon struggles to provide an alternative.
Set for a rip off
The remaining hour and a half is basically a collection of action set pieces with the emotional range of an erased hard drive. This isn’t to say that Colony is incapable of being clever. There’s a particularly tense sequence where one bunch of characters has to cross a metaphorical minefield and unite with another group across the way. It’s thrillingly staged. But a little while later, there’s another scene where the survivors huddle together in front of a dozen CCTVs and watch the zombies wreak havoc in every corner of the building. It’s decidedly underwhelming.
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The remaining survivors are told that the building has been quarantined and that rescue teams won’t simply shoot their way through the infected to get to them. Instead, the survivors must find their way to the roof and meet them there.
The first act takes place, much like Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, inside a shopping mall. This is when the movie is at its most exciting, when both the zombies and the survivors are learning in real time how to outsmart each other. It’s only when the action moves into the office areas of the building that the film begins to lose its way.
It would be rude to reveal what happens in the final act, but suffice it to say that Yeon completely relinquishes the claustrophobia of the first hour in favour of a climax that would appeal to every Bollywood director of Sanjay Gupta’s generation looking for “inspiration”. The best compliment one could pay Colony is that it’s the kind of movie that could one day get ripped off.
