Cool looking and great production values, but never quite getting our emotional involvement, The Colony is a so-so sci-fi thriller that isn’t bad for a casual watch, if one keeps the expectations realistic.
In the future, planet Earth has been devastated by climate change, pandemics, and other human catastrophes. Many people relocated en masse to a distant planet, setting up Space Colony Kepler, but something about this planet (which is never seen in the film) has made them sterile.
To save humanity, young astronauts head back to planet earth in search of fertility possibilities and the chances of re-populating earth, now that several generations have passed since the apocalypse.
As they land, the craft is damaged and one of the astronauts is gravely injured, which leaves Blake (French actress Nora Arnezeder) on her own to discover what’s happening in this misty, gray, and eerily beautiful flat Waterworld-ish landscape.
Blake is initially captured by a tribe of earthly survivors who speak an unfamiliar language and have a relatively sophisticated existence, given the circumstances of their natural habitat.
From here, I will avoid spoiling the plot, other than to broadly say that she discovers people she knew and what those people are doing on earth still is important to the rest of the film. Some of these details are revealed in the official trailer below, if you’d like more details.
Those plot points seem largely cobbled together from many post-apocalyptic stories of the past few decades or so, and, as I say, we never quite buy in on an emotional level. However, I definitely felt interested and curious enough to want to follow the character’s journey and see where things were going.
I wasn’t mad at it. 2 ½ out of 4 Stars | Reviewed by Kyle Osborne. Although the film is a German production, it is in English.
Now in theaters and on demand platforms