What works hardest against this film is its pedigree. Yeon Sang-ho’s Train to Busan quickly became a high bar for zombie horror, delivering an emotional gut-punch, fully realized characters and phenomenal execution. While unfair, the comparison is inevitable, and unfortunately this movie is not on the same level. That said, it’s pretty decent.
Rather than return to a claustrophobic setting, a towering modern biotech firm allows a vastly larger playground and wider setpieces as the characters move from floor to floor. The pacing and action are breakneck, but the film does pause outside the outbreak to focus on response teams that detract from the barrage. Yeon does attempt to distinguish these zombies from typical fare to serve as his vehicle for social commentary. Unfortunately, it is not as smart as it likes to think. This ground has been covered before, and while the presentation is well-polished, not all the deeper concepts land.
This movie strives for unique ideas, but sacrifices heart and emotional resonance. None of the characters are particularly deep or interesting and the director seems far more enamored with presenting his dissertation than developing any of them. Characters commit the usual sins of plot-demanded idiocy, over-exaggerated traits, although there is one delightfully cartoonish villain to the piece.
The horde is terrifying. It moves with a nightmarish intensity, morphing through different stages of threat. The individual members are fast, adaptive, and contorting in nonhuman ways as they pursue any moving target. Initially they present feral and animalistic, but before long they are demonstrably changing, communicating and shifting their patterns. Their intention isn’t to kill, but to spread, infect and augment their collective. Increasing their danger and functionality with each additional victim. There is also a visceral grossness to them, spewing and excreting nastiness wherever they go, quickly the visible surfaces are coated in a filth whose smell one can only imagine.
Now in case you aren’t paying attention, the plot will be explained through gratuitous exposition dumps in a patronizing manner befitting small children and tiny brains. The director doesn’t seem to think you have the capacity to catch the nuance of what he’s attempting to depict, so he utilizes proxy characters to explain the science, character motivation, and the social analogy. And perhaps this is deserved, the movie doesn’t depict humanity in particularly high esteem.
Colony isn’t Busan, but it wasn’t trying to be. What it is, is a nasty and relentless zombie film that trusts its ideas more than its people and doesn’t trust audiences at all.