MOVIE REVIEW: The Colony

Published May 2, 2014

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THE COLONY

DIRECTOR: Jeff Renfroe

CAST: Laurence Fishburne, Bill Paxton, Kevin Zegers, Charlotte Sullivan, Dru Viergever

CLASSIFICATION: 16 LV

RUNNING TIME: 94 minutes

RATING: **

AN endangered band of survivors in the next ice age encounter a bigger threat than disease and starvation in Renfroe’s The Colony.

With a frostbitten script, whose skeletal plot cuts and pastes bits from innumerable other survival yarns, the biggest surprise the film offers is that four people were required to write it.

The presence of Paxton and Fishburne will probably attract viewers, but the pic’s theatrical release should fare only a little better than the recent megabomb Stranded, a similarly derivative and lifeless sci-fi flick starring Christian Slater.

Fishburne and Paxton play old army comrades who now lead Colony 7, buried deep inside a seed-bank bunker that allows them to grow hydroponic food.

A glimpse of a bee colony down there draws real-world comparisons to this human group’s own version of colony collapse disorder: “The last flu wiped out 20 people,” we’re told in voice-over, and even a sneeze is enough to get someone quarantined, then marched out into the snow to die.

When a distress call comes in from Colony 5, Briggs (Fishburne) takes Sam (Zegers) along in his rescue team. But there’s no one to rescue at the end of their trek through the snow – just a band of cannibals who discovered this bunker and have turned its inhabitants into a banquet.

As the search party races back home, their footprints are a convenient map to the flesh-eaters’ next windfall. Here’s a little known fact: When humans turn to cannibalism in an ice-age scenario, they lose the capacity for speech, instead communicating grumpi- ness in a language of threatening wheezy noises. (They also file their teeth to fine points, though this fact has been better exposed in recent years.)

Devoid of menacing intellect, the feral humans are just chase-and-chomp machines, well suited for action sequences that always seem to take place in rooms illuminated by shorting-out electric light or flickering flame.

CGI depictions of newly ice-covered cities are unconvincing, though a central standoff on a falling-apart bridge works reasonably well.

Tension between colony leaders over how to deal with their sick (a great deal is made over group rules that allow them to choose the method of their death) generates only superficial tension before the cannibals come knocking. – Hollywood Reporter

If you liked The Purge or Lockout you will like this.

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