The Colony (2013)

The Colony is science fiction movie where they forgot to write the story and make it a real science fiction movie. I could tell with few words what happens in this movie. Once you hear what this is about you can pretty much guess what will happen. The Colony tries to hide lack of story by not telling what has happened and where we really are. Narrator doesn't tell it. We just jump in the middle of power struggle and we have to figure out what is going on.

The Colony happens in future where humans tried to combat climate change/global warming with weather control towers. Something went wrong and mankind got new ice age. I don't understand why global warming causes ice age in movies. Day After Tomorrow (2004) was another where this happened.  When movie begins there are only few colonies surviving. Our colony loses contact to last another colony they have contact. Colony sends three men to investigate what happened to another colony. Telling anything more about the story would spoil the whole movie. There really is not much more of story.

Lack of science fiction is almost annoying. Only science fiction is in setting. There is almost nothing about climate change or anything else of what really happened. It is just ice age and people trying to survive there. Beginning hints of power struggle. That really goes nowhere because Bill Paxton's character is so badly written. Laurence Fishburne does what he can but his character  is as badly written. There is pretty much nothing to tell about other characters either.

The Colony doesn't have anything that would make it worth your time. Sole reason for that is the script. It doesn't have anything interesting. It might remind you of other better movies which did these things much better. Movie doesn't have any major problems that couldn't be fixed with adding more words to script. The Colony shows why you should tell the premise at the beginning. Movie lost me when I didn't understand what was going on. It was just waiting and hoping that movie would tell what was going on.

The Colony chose to tell as little as possible. This time it didn't work. For that to work movie should have told the premise at the beginning. If you think about Mad Max 2. It doesn't tell much either and it has very little dialog. But it tells what is going on at the beginning. After that it didn't need to get back to it. This movie needed similar beginning. Now I concentrated too much on everything because I knew nothing.

I wanted to like The Colony but as it is, it only reminded of another movies. Screamers (1995) comes first in mind. It has quite similar premise and it works better. What they find from another colony is totally different but feel of the movies are same.