Tina Kakadelis
In 2016, director Yeon Sang-ho and screenwriter Park Joo-suk sent a jolt through the zombie genre with Train to Busan. This film broke the norms of the zombie greats that came before and forged a new path. Ten years on, Sang-ho returns to the world of zombies with Colony. Co-written by Sang-ho and Choi Gyu-seok, Colony gives Sang-ho a chance to once again upend the expectations of the genre. The stakes are higher, the zombies are smarter, and the number of possible infectees is now sky-high.
Colony relies heavily on the indecision of government and police officials, and the opening shows how easily all this could have been stopped if people had sprung into action when they needed to. It’s an opening much like that of Train to Busan, where lax procedures allow society to fall apart. Colony opens with a young man, Seo Young Cheo (Koo Kyo-hwan), who tells the 911 dispatcher he will be unleashing a terrorist attack at the Dongwoori Building in downtown Seoul. Despite this warning, police show up only after this attack has infected quite a few members of the public and attendees of a biotech conference. A ragtag group of survivors, including a professor (Jun Ji-hyun), are trapped inside the building with a horde of zombies desperate to tear them apart and no help coming from the outside.
The days of the brain-dead, slow-moving zombies are gone in Colony. The horde in this film is relentless, but more frightening is their ability to learn. A speaker at the biotech conference shared his findings on collective intelligence and talked about how colonies of certain species can share information without needing to verbalize it. They believe this is the answer to cell regeneration and other scientific breakthroughs. For the film’s zombies, though, this means they are more terrifying than anything that has come before. When the first people are infected, they’re all flailing limbs. Violent and able to target their attacks, yes, but in a very haphazard way. They run on all fours, recklessly hurling themselves toward their prey. Eventually, these zombies begin to learn. They rise to two feet, coordinate strikes with one another, and, in an expert turn of the screw, learn to speak.
The fear of these zombies is palpable, and the first hour of the film is a white-knuckle effort to survive. There’s enough introduction to the trapped people that the audience is actively rooting for their survival without being bogged down by irrelevant information. This group of civilians is also decently smart. They’re scared, and some are braver than others, but leading up to the one-hour mark, the viewer can’t fault any of them for their choices. In fact, they do a pretty fair job of fighting against the horde, despite not understanding what these zombies are capable of.
At around the hour mark, things start to turn. It’s not that characters get sloppy with their choices because they’re tired or frustrated. Their actions feel purposefully misguided so the film can be stretched for another hour. After a while, the viewer has grown weary and punchy, desperate for a way out. Survival films are tense if they feel close to possibility, which Colony does for a long while. The pressure is released as soon as the spell is broken by out-of-character decision-making that causes things to go from bad to worse.
Much like the movies of the 1950s, we’re seeing a resurgence of media afraid of a swarm mentality that wipes away a person’s essence and intricacies. A certain Apple TV+ show whose name would ruin the reveal is one such example. The Last of Us, Stranger Things, and Colony all touch on this fear of losing one’s self to a collective consciousness. It’s not that different from the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers from 1956, but this modern fear could stem from real concerns surrounding Artificial Intelligence. Does the rise of AI mean the fall of humanity’s essence? Humans are a unique species, and if we allow AI to run rampant, we will create a horde of our own. They likely won’t be slobbering and covered in mucus like the infected in Colony, but they will be controllable. Colony is a clobbering work of zombie cinema, but one whose setup is more dazzling than its payoff.
