The Movie: Colony
The Director: Yeon Sang-ho
The Cast: Gianna Jun, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Shin Hyun-been, Kim Shin-rock, GO Soo
The Story: Professor Se Jeong attends a biotech conference, only to witness it spiral into catastrophe when a rapidly mutating virus is unleashed. As the outbreak spreads and the infected begin to transform, authorities seal off the entire facility.
The Rating: 8 / 10
The Review:
Yeon Sang-ho directed Train to Busan which, in my opinion, is one of the best zombie movies ever made so expectations will always be high any time he returns to the genre. Even though his other zombie films Peninsula and Seoul Station failed to land with audiences, I still found both of them to be reasonably entertaining and now we have Colony which puts a totally different spin on the idea of what zombies are and how they are brought to life, so to speak.
The majority of the movie is set inside of an office tower building which gives it a really fun disaster movie vibe to go along with all the zombie craziness that's going on. I'm not going to say how or why the zombies exist but it's definitely a different angle on the idea than what director Yeon has shown us before which means this isn't any type of sequel or continuation of the other three movies. That's also not a complaint; I really liked the idea of switching things up a bit while still presenting the same levels of danger for the protagonists just in slightly different ways.
Whenever I watch zombie movies, I always wonder about the casting process when it comes to hiring the people who will play the transformed characters since they're often asked to contort their bodies and faces in pretty extreme ways and there's plenty of that going on here. Overall, the casting for this movie was really well done with Jun Ji-hyun in the lead role. I do remember seeing her in Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and apparently, she's done a lot of great work since then as well.
Make no mistake, this movie is all about the action, from beginning to end and I do like the fact that the story is mostly contained inside the office tower building which, in my opinion, helped to keep it from getting too big for its own good. Sort of like how The Raid: Redemption is such an amazing martial arts action movie because it doesn't go all crazy, everything is right there inside the building the whole time. There are a lot of really creative ways in how the surviving characters hide, escape, and/or fight against the growing horde including the use of technology which makes sense because the movie's overall messaging is about the dangers of misusing tech and information that we don't fully understand.
Even with the focus being high-stakes and intense action, director Yeon manages, like he did in Train to Busan, to give us compelling characters that we genuinely care about. Because of his track record, I knew there was going to be some emotions happening and sure enough, a few of the death scenes had me up in my feelings. There's just something about Korean cinema in general that has that effect no matter the genre but, when it comes to horror, you're not really expecting to get all emotional so maybe that's also why it hits a little harder.
Overall, the movie is very well done and is a return to glory for the director which I was very happy to see. While there is a pretty definitive ending to this story, it is a zombie horror movie, so we do get a few hints that we may get to see more down the road and, if that's the case, I'm here for all of it.
Thank you for reading this review, I really had fun watching this movie, even with subtitles so please don't let that scare you away. “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.” - Bong Joon-ho, director of Parasite, winner of the 2020 Academy Award for best motion picture.
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