With the worldwide longing for Korean style entertainments displaying no signal of abating, it could possibly’t be simple to be a filmmaker tasked with feeding the beast with ever greater, higher, bonecrunching-er novelties. And that should go double for a director like Yeon Sang-ho who, with 2016’s “Train to Busan,” beforehand gnawed into the throat of the fast-zombie subgenre and immediately contaminated it with new, ravenous power. Ten years, an animated prequel (“Seoul Station”) and a disappointing live-action sequel (“Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula”) later, Yeon returns to action-horror with “Colony” an entertaining if empty-headed train in familiarity, with just a few neat new methods up its bloodstained, gore-flecked sleeve.
Firstly although, let’s shortly dispense with the perennial argument over whether or not we are able to name these specific post-human cannibalistic freaks “zombies” provided that they’re technically contaminated somewhat than lifeless — as a result of sure, we are able to. And admittedly, that sort of pedantry won’t serve you nicely should you’re in search of to get pleasure from a film as determinedly immune to close-read mental evaluation as “Colony,” the place issues occur simply because they do, destruction happens simply because it could possibly and other people get horribly chomped-and-changed as a result of, as crunchily choreographed (by “Train to Busan” zombie-transformation maven Jeon Younger) and as impressively carried out by a extremely contortionist troupe of writhing, spasming, body-popping dancers, it is vitally good enjoyable to observe.
“Colony” is for some motive not a part of the “Train” universe, and maybe in an effort to set it aside — and to provide the outbreak each a human face and a few type of human, albeit batshit, motivation — right here the virus that causes all of the mayhem is a man-made weapon of terror. Its architect, Search engine optimisation Younger-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) is the precise combo of intelligent, devious and disgruntled that’s the making of many a film villain, and has been utilizing the time since he was fired from his job with biotech large Chains Bio to formulate his dastardly revenge.
It’s the day of a giant Chains Bio convention, to which scientist Han Kyo-seong (Go Soo) has introduced his ex-wife Kwon Se-jeong (in style Korean star Gianna Jun) with the purpose of serving to her land a job. A superb biochemist whose prickly, received’t-play-nice-with-others angle means she retains rubbing potential employers the unsuitable method, Se-jeong is surly and snarky. Instantly, we like her lots. The pair get a quick viewers with the Chains Bio CEO, earlier than he’s referred to as away and promptly injected, by baddie Younger-cheol, with a extremely infectious zombifying serum. As boss-man turns right into a cantering, slavering, apparently all-over treble-jointed ghoul, Younger-cheol broadcasts that his personal residing blood incorporates the one antidote. So he can’t be killed if there’s ever to be hope of synthesizing a vaccine.
Chunk to chew, the outbreak spreads like wildfire out from the convention heart which is positioned, in the very best George Romero custom, in a shopping center — as if the brick-and-mortar retail sector weren’t having a nasty sufficient time of it already. Se-jeong and Kyo-seong get caught within the ensuing chaos, and find yourself main an ever-dwindling band of inventory characters: a frazzled policeman, a bullied teenage woman, her vacuous mean-girl tormentor and her sneering boyfriend, and an off-duty safety guard (Ji Chang-wook), who’s touchingly dedicated to his wheelchair-user sister (Kim Shin-rok).
With the authorities outdoors paralysed into inaction, no less than till one other sciencey boffin exhibits as much as lead the exterior hunt for a treatment — in a large contrivance, she occurs to be Kyo-seong’s present spouse (Shin Hyun-been) — the survivors perceive that no rescue is coming. And they also must “Towering Inferno” their very own method by way of a number of ranges of zombie-infested storefronts, again places of work and passageways to succeed in security.
That is sophisticated by “Colony”‘s largest narrative innovation: this virus has been engineered to permit the contaminated to speak with one another like a colony of ants. When one in every of them learns one thing, it may be handed on to all of them, by way of a really cool, creepy “Body-Snatchers”-esque maneuver that quickly freezes them in a silent screaming posture as new data is downloaded. Which means that no two units of zombies may be bested in fairly the identical method, as a result of as quickly as one in every of their weaknesses is recognized — initially, for instance, the dumb-ass hordes can’t differentiate between actual people and their representations as poster ads or retailer mannequins — the hive thoughts is upgraded to eradicate that exact bug.
The inter-human drama, nonetheless, is much less curiously drawn. And common guests to the zombie Yeon-iverse will recognise the director’s trademark pessimism in relation to how readily he believes individuals will abandon or betray one another if it means even barely bettering our personal survival odds. A surprisingly candy alliance develops between two good ladies who’ve each been married to the identical man, which makes a pleasant change from the Korean style staple of a businessman protagonist whose complete emotional arc is his dawning realization that he ought to perhaps spend extra time along with his youngsters. However except for that, Yeon and co-writer Choi Gyu-seok follow the pre-established script of being ruthless in relation to who they’ll kill off, and scathing of their evaluation of humanity’s capability for heroism.
There’s quite a lot of speak of evolution right here. Stone-faced madman Younger-cheol believes that his telepathically (or pheremonically) linked progeny mark an enormous leap up for a species whose chief design flaw is that our ideas and behaviors can’t be centrally monitored and managed. However “Colony” itself is simply a small step ahead for this ever-mutating style, mashing up the catastrophe film, the Z-horror canon, the Borg episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and even some design parts from “Aliens” to make its senseless, misshapen, mucus-extruding monsters a wonderfully sufficient placeholder till somebody — put your cash on Yeon Sang-ho — invents a next-gen zombie that may fly.
