TL;DR: Colony is a zombie movie with an excellent idea behind its infected, some genuinely impressive action and a strong cast, although the human drama never quite reaches the same level.
Plot
Professor Se Jeong attends a biotech conference, only to witness it spiral into catastrophe when a rapidly mutating virus is unleashed. As the outbreak spreads and the infected begin to transform, authorities seal off the entire facility.
Colony Makes Its Zombies Much More Interesting
The first thing I will say about Colony is that somebody has clearly sat down and thought, "Okay, we've done zombies running at people, now what"? The answer is collective intelligence, and thankfully the movie actually does something with it rather than introducing a clever concept and then forgetting about it twenty minutes later.
The infected here can learn, adapt and respond to what happens around them, which I really did like, because as we all know zombies can become a bit predictable when their entire personality consists of walking toward the nearest human until somebody hits them with a chair, but here, their behavior changes because they are learning, which makes them feel like an actual threat that is capable of changing the situation.
Apparently, contemporary dancers were involved in developing the infected's movement, and that little production detail makes sense when you see the finished result, because their movements have an awkwardness to them that regular zombie running doesn't have.
The Action Is Where Colony Really Comes Alive
Another thing I liked was that the filmmakers seem to understand that bigger doesn't automatically mean better, as while we have large-scale sequences with huge numbers of infected, there are also tighter scenes where the geography of the location matters more than the number of bodies on screen, so I could actually follow what was happening, which sounds like a ridiculously low bar, but apparently we have reached a point where I feel the need to celebrate it.
The camera doesn't spend every major attack spinning around like somebody dropped it down a staircase, and that makes the violence considerably more effective so you can see where people are, where the threat is coming from and why somebody is suddenly in serious trouble.
There is plenty of blood as well, and the movie isn't particularly precious about what happens to its characters either - people are bitten, crushed, thrown around and generally subjected to a fairly miserable time, which is exactly what I want from a serious zombie movie.
There is also something amusingly bleak about people fighting for their lives in a space presumably designed to encourage people to spend money, and that corporate side of the setting isn't pushed so hard that the movie becomes a two-hour lecture about capitalism, thankfully, but it feeds into the film's broader ideas about information, technology and corporate research.
The Human Side of Things
For all the effort that has gone into making the infected interesting, the human characters don't receive quite the same attention though, because I didn't always feel as emotionally connected to them as the movie seemed to want me to be.
Some relationships here are clearly supposed to carry significant emotional weight, yet the screenplay sometimes moves through those moments so quickly that I understood the importance without actually feeling it.
Train to Busan for example was incredibly good at making the survival situation hurt because I actually cared about the people before the movie started putting them through hell, but Colony is more fascinated by the outbreak itself, and I don't think that is necessarily a bad choice, but it does mean the emotional scenes aren't always as devastating.
Colony Is At Its Best When It Lets The Zombies Do The Talking
The more I think about Colony, the more I think its biggest strength is also the reason some of the human material feels weaker - the movie is simply more interested in its infected, and I don't mean that as an insult, because they are genuinely fascinating to watch, and the collective intelligence gives the filmmakers plenty of opportunities to create situations that would be impossible with standard movie zombies.
A group suddenly changing direction, reacting to something that happened earlier or using an environment differently is enough to make you realize the rules have changed, and those are the moments where the film feels smartest because it trusts the audience to understand what is happening.
I would happily have traded some of the exposition for more of that, because the movie doesn't need to explain every clever idea it has, as some of its best moments work precisely because I am watching something happen and realizing, slightly too late, what it means for everybody else.
But I did enjoy Colony quite a lot, with my main criticism being that the emotional side isn't quite there, which keeps it below Train to Busan for me, although very few zombie movies are going to win that particular comparison anyway, but what Colony does have is an identity of its own.
It takes a familiar genre, gives its infected a genuinely useful new ability and builds the action around that idea, and for a zombie film, that is a pretty decent result.
Final Thoughts
While the human drama could have hit a bit harder, the action and intelligence concept still make this a damn good zombie movie that I am sure you will have enough fun with to make it worth your while....Probably.
Trailer
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