When it’s over, imagine the next ice age when survivors must seek refuge below ground. Food is grown hydroponically, and small livestock are bred and stored underground. The endless snowfall and frigid temperatures make venturing outdoors dangerous. If you can imagine this, then you are imagining The Colony. Briggs, Sam, and Mason (Laurence Fishburne, Kevin Zegers, and Bill Paxton) are residents of Colony 7. When they receive a distress signal from Colony 5, they travel to their neighbouring friends, and discover something worse than the ice age. This is a low-budgeted film that has great potential, but a lack of a compelling characters keep the film cold and buried. Without giving away too much of the plot, I have to point out that the villains are not menacing enough to make them stand out from other gang-attack-like films. They remind me of Mad Max look-a-likes. Their acts are heinous, but they do not look atrocious. Based on their behaviour, they should have deformities that separates them from other humans. The heroes, Briggs and Sam, are one-dimensional and boring, while Mason is the stereotypical trigger-happy individual whose end is predictable. All three of these main characters could benefit from some backstories and personality traits that will better define them, such as, fears, regrets, phobias, or a personal calling that pushes them to act and react. Give me a multi-dimensional character, and I will care, and their motivations and deaths will have greater meaning. Lastly, the ending is all wrong. This is a film that needs resolution. I need to see the “thawed” colony, which the survivors mention in several scenes and are trying desperately to get to. To leave this detail out makes the film incomplete.
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