PLOT: A biotech conference eruts into chaos after a terrorist attack infects attendees with a virus that turns them into violent creatures, with them all connected to a hive mind that allows them to quickly adapt. One of the attendees, a former professor (Gianna Jun), manages to escape with a handful of other survivors as they try to make it out of the building alive.
REVIEW: I’m probably not the first – nor will I be the last – to say Colony is kind of like Die Hard with zombies. It’s the latest action-horror hybrid from South Korea’s Yeon Sang-ho, who made one of the better modern-day zombie films, the influential Train to Busan (as well as its massively budgeted sequel, Peninsula). After a break from the genre, he’s back with another large-scale entry, with a novel twist.
In Colony, the zombies (or rather – infected) are all connected to a single hive mind, with them the victims of a virus designed by a psychotic scientist (Koo Kyo-hwan) with an axe to grind. He’s also infected himself with the antibody, leaving the authorities in a precarious state. As far as they know, the infected could theoretically be cured, so they can’t just start mowing them down. They also have to somehow capture the scientist alive as he’s the only hope of a cure – although that might be exactly what he wants.
Like Train to Busan, Colony is mostly confined to a single location – in this case a sprawling office building, allowing our heroes more ground to cover this time out. Like most zombie-disaster films, the survivors each have their backstories, with some more prominent than others. The main ones are Gianna Jun’s Se-jeong, who is only attending the conference because she was dragged there by her nice-guy ex-husband, Gyu-seong (Go Soo), who wants to help her rebuild after a scandal cost her a professorship. There’s also Ji Chang-wook’s Hyun-seok, a security guard who is easily the most proficient survivor and is preoccupied with protecting his older sister, a paraplegic IT worker visiting him on the job. There’s also a cop who’s probably wound a little too tight, a rich jerk, a selfless older guy, and a bunch of teens.
What’s unique in Colony is how the infected, who operate as a singular unit, compare to the survivors, who are initially heroic and work well as a team, but quickly begin to splinter, as most only become concerned with saving themselves. A disastrous misunderstanding also pits one survivor against the others, leading to a whole lot of carnage.
Like a lot of South Korean genre fare, the budget on this one seems high, with it having top-notch production values and an epic feel. I’ve always found this to be an interesting contrast to how North America treats horror, as it’s rare outside of a few examples – such as World War Z – for movies like this to really be made on a tentpole level. Clearly Colony was made to be a blockbuster, as it’s lavishly mounted. What’s really cool is that Sang-ho has almost completely eschewed CGI, with practical gore (although it’s modest) and a huge cast of contortionists playing zombies. Compared to 28 Years Later, whose zombies struck me as a bit too performative (it felt like each of them was trying to be noticed by the camera), these ones all work as a group, with the choreographed attacks beautifully designed.
While many of the characters fit genre archetypes, occasionally they do subvert expectations. Gianna Jun, who’s an icon in South Korean cinema thanks to starring in the classic My Sassy Girl, is a good heroine, with her believably flawed. She’s a hero, but she doesn’t always have the answers and has her own past mistakes to own up to – with her having a meaningful connection to the terrorist mastermind, which is revealed later. As the bad guy, Koo Kyo-hwan is appropriately menacing, while Ji Chang-wook steals a lot of scenes as the capable but rash security guard who has one of the movie’s cooler arcs.
While Colony isn’t the best zombie movie I’ve seen recently (I’d give that honour to The Bone Temple) and likely won’t be the best comic-book movie out this year (I have high hopes for the new Resident Evil), it will no doubt please fans when it comes out this summer. It’s not up to the level of Train to Busan, but it’s wildly entertaining and slickly made.