Looking at director Jeff Renfroe, he's a capable and talented director who I know from his intriguing feature film debut "One Point O" in 2004, which was followed by the more widely known "Civic Duty" about two years later, also well received. After a long period out of the spotlight, I was delighted to see his name attached to "The Colony", a film with a seemingly sufficient budget of $16 million and an experienced, capable cast. I love these type of genre blends, the elements of overcoming not just nature, but humanity in order to survive extinction. When you've seen as many of these films as I have you come to expect familiar elements and a plot that is far from original, we're in an area now where nothing is new, where everything is borrowing from one film or another. For me the success of this film will undoubtedly depend on it's script, acting and effects, when all are done brilliantly, the plot originality can be somewhat sacrificed, unfortunately this film was eons away from brilliant. As we have seen many times before it's all about us versus them, against the elements of nature.
The film takes place in a post-apocalyptic era, where the remainder of Earth's inhabitants have been driven underground due to sustained sub- zero temperatures. The surface has become a frozen wasteland void of life. Out of the few that did survive, many died due to overcrowding, starvation and sickness. The film revolves around an underground colony of survivors whose numbers are dwindling because of rampant flu, consisting of roughly forty people responsible for growing food and storing seeds in hopes that the surface will again someday be capable of growing crops. It's a last ditch effort to preserve humanity against all odds, some of which they are not prepared to face, a new evil, far more dangerous than the frozen surface or flu.
The leader of colony seven is Briggs (Laurence Fishburne) , after receiving a distress call from colony five, he picks one member out of the group Sam (Kevin Zegers) to accompany him and another member Graydon (Atticus Dean Mitchell) volunteers to accompany them. What they find there is not at all what they expected. It's inhabitants have been decimated by a rogue group and as the film swiftly shifts into higher gears, it's no longer clear who, if anyone, will be able to survive what is coming.
The first thing that many may be quick to criticize will be the script, the lack of detail & explanation. Worse yet after the extended period of time it takes to inject any real fear or excitement into the story it has completely failed to engage the viewer by an utter lack of character development even after forty long minutes in. When the pace quickens the viewer becomes easily detached by the chaos that ensues, leaving the question behind "who should I be caring for & why". Personally I didn't mind the slow crawl in the film's beginning, it successfully laid down a solid foundation for the second half to launch from and it did with sustained intensity. It was in that intensity where the film seemed to lose its identity to some degree within the onslaught of the attack. Another thing that may put off some viewer's was a major lack of explanation as to how exactly humanity ended up in the ridiculous spot they were holding up in. Again many weak points in the script to be found all throughout the film. Nonetheless, there were some solid performances given by the cast and the cinematography was superb, having an actual decommissioned NORAD base to use as a set made for an absolutely perfect backdrop. Despite the aforementioned problems, the film still holds decent entertaining value, enough to meet my initial expectations for a direct to disc sci-fi flick. The end wasn't very reassuring, I would have preferred something less in the grey area. Although, as a whole, it was light years ahead of other recent more expansive films like "After Earth". Again, it had it's problems but it's still worth a VOD or Redbox pick for fans of the genre .
