Although the zombie craze lie dormant from, go figure, oversaturation, that message never made it to the producers of The Walking Dead (seven separate series, guys?) or overseas. Particularly to South Korea, where Yeon Sang-ho keeps the undead movies alive. Colony marks the gifted director’s fourth such feature, but the first to exist outside his 10-year-old Train to Busan franchise.
Inside a Seoul skyscraper, disgruntled scientist Dr. Suh Young-chul (Koo Kyo-hwan, Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula) commits an act of bioterrorism at his former employer’s annual conference: unleashing a zombie-outbreak virus, and he’s the human vaccine. Rude, but at least the doctor has the courtesy to give 911 a heads-up!
Like a disaster spectacular in its 1970s heyday, Sang-ho (The Ugly) throws together a mishmash of personalities — tortured academics, vacationing siblings, millennial scumbags — who must work together to find their way to the roof for rescue. Naturally, teamwork is an alien concept to most, but hey, somebody’s gotta get zom-mobbed.
Making Colony somewhat unique is our villain’s control over the horde via hive mind or collective intelligence; they share and exchange information through pheromones, requiring a network of mucus. This is why the tower hallways grow so gooey, they look like they harbor a sinus infection. To the movie’s credit, this isn’t some gimmick or MacGuffin. Seriously, name one other movie where slime mold research dictates plotting.
In conjunction, these zombies evolve as the minutes tick by. They scurry and skitter on all fours like dogs, then graduate to head-butting glass and running, before climbing on one another like ants to form a more formidable foe. Whenever they communicate, their heads amusingly pop up and out, looking like the poster art for Scanners.
Once more, Sang-ho handles the high-scale, high-stakes action really well. Even with his script concerned about a madman’s desire for a populace reinvention, Colony is, all told, ultimately more conventional than the lightning strike that is the original Busan. This one bolts with a rip-roaring first hour before hitting a wall of repetition. Scenes begin to parrot the one before it, halting an otherwise consistent level of energy. At 122 minutes, it’s almost as if Sang-ho wanted the running time to match the building’s stories. If that weren’t merely hypothetical, finding a site with 30 fewer floors would rid the bloat and get to the hard-charging vehicular pursuit sequence sooner.
Just not at the sacrifice of the laboratory’s zombie monkeys, please. —Rod Lott
In theaters Friday, Aug. 28.