THE STORY – Professor Se-jeong is thrust into a bloody nightmare when a rapidly mutating virus is released during a biotech conference, causing authorities to seal the facility. Trapped inside with no escape, Se-jeong, along with a small group of survivors, must fight to stay alive while the infected undergo horrific transformations.
THE CAST – Gianna Jun, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Shin Hyun-been & Kim Shin-rock
THE TEAM – Yeon Sang-ho (Director/Writer) & Choi Gyu-seok (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 123 minutes
Is there a genre of film more undead than the zombie flick? Despite the many ways of doing the same thing over and over again, filmmakers seem drawn to the vagaries of watching shuffling, stultified humans crave flesh, all while pretzel-rolling their narratives to try for something, at least, that passes for unique. Sometimes the playfulness within the genre works, as Danny Boyle has proven, or even in the case of Marc Forster’s “World War Z.” But with “Gun Che” (aka “Colony”), the latest film from Yeon Sang-ho, perhaps at least some of these tropes should finally be laid to rest.
Yeon Sang-ho, known to general audiences for 2016’s “Train to Busan,” which also attempted to elevate zombie fare, follows a similar track with his latest film. With “Colony,” there’s the added gobbledygook of a scientific experiment unleashed for evil purposes, told with the subtlety of a “Spider-Man” film. However, in this context, it somehow feels even more ridiculous. Seo Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) is the literal central antagonist, a biochemist who self-administers a potion to grant himself immunity to an infection of his own making. Kwon Se-jeong (Jun Ji-hyun) is a biotech professor invited to a lecture, only to find herself, along with her ex-husband Han Gyu-seong (Go Soo), in the middle of an outbreak-fueled onslaught.
The hook this time is tying the outbreak to, of all things, green slime mould. The notion of simple organisms gaining power through communication, facilitating their eventual evolution, becomes the mechanism reshaping the infected, turning them from creatures walking on all fours into beings that slowly become more human-like in their attack patterns. It’s a decent way of expanding the lore, even if it still feels derivative of superior storylines elsewhere. Still, at its core, that’s the inviting element that makes the film’s scenes of mayhem and gore work to whatever extent one wishes to charitably admire.
The terminal issue, unfortunately, is the glacial pace Yeon Sang-ho and Choi Gyu-seok’s script takes to get to its damn point. There’s soap-opera nonsense sprinkled throughout, from a cutesy dynamic between the new wife and the ex that serves as the film’s central connective tissue, through to appallingly two-dimensional characters who, when disposed of by a mob of slathering, blood-soaked beings, barely register any emotional impact.
Much of the camerawork feels like a sordid, aimless video game, with attempts at slick POV shots coming across as trite and the shaky-cam aesthetic leaning more toward barf-cam than amplified visual intensity. The performances are in keeping with the mood, even if the two dominant modes appear to be tearful screaming or taciturn seriousness, regardless of who the film happens to be focusing on at any given moment.
There’s some cleverness in the ways survivors attempt to outwit their foes, and the use of security camera footage to situate events inside a locked-down building and mall environment is at least evocative of the genre’s more celebrated examples. But just as a burst of action begins to take hold, things quickly unwind, and rather than feeling well-paced, the result becomes frustratingly sporadic.
The bloated 122-minute runtime feels completely unearned, and playing as a proper midnight screening would likely be a significant misfire, with much of the audience no doubt nodding off before anything substantial arrives to satisfy their bloodlust. Yet it’s exactly this audience that may be the only one for this otherwise empty exercise, and anyone craving something more thoughtful behind the boisterousness will be sorely disappointed.
The result is a mediocre genre blast, palatable only to those craving another bite of the zombie-film genre, a middling, messily constructed effort with only minor details that can truly be considered original. It’s too innocuous to be truly awful, so even those masochists looking for a future cult disaster to call their own may leave disappointed. Flawed and forgettable, “Colony” fails to build toward anything substantial, resulting in a film filled with swarms of zombie-like denizens lacking any real stylistic or narrative bite.
