Movie Review: 'The Colony' (2021) Starring Nora Arnezeder

My least favorite film sub-genre is dystopian fiction. Grimy, dirty people eating each other and talking solely about how awful all of humanity is just does nothing for me. Most dystopian fiction feels the same to me. I even had strong reservations about Mad Max Fury Road because, again, dirty people talking about how bad humanity is and blah, blah, blah. Now, I know that Mad Max Fury Road is the internet’s favorite movie, so, please, allow me to remind you that I do admire that movie, I just don’t love it with the kind of fury that you do. Sorry.

This distaste for dystopian fiction made me dread the new movie The Colony starring Nora Arnezeder. Looking at the premise I imagined yet another 100 minutes of my life would be spent watching dirty people complain about how awful humanity is. Don’t mistake me for a Pollyanna, look it up, I’m not explaining Pollyanna to you, I just don’t completely hate the entire human species. There are good people in the world and too often our entertainment fails to reflect that. The dystopian genre is an especially cynical place and thus not to my taste.

Thus I was thoroughly blown away by the fact that not only was I not completely hating the experience of The Colony, I was genuinely enjoying director Tim Fehlbaum’s ever so slightly less hateful version of dystopia. Nora Arnezeder plays a character who retains a few shreds of hope in her lead performance and tiny notes of Wall-E peak in here and there to remind us that maybe the world isn’t such a completely terrible place, even in the waterlogged dystopian future.

The Colony stars Nora Arnezeder, fresh from her role in the zombie apocalypse flick Army of the Dead, as an astronaut named Blake. As we join the story we find Blake and a fellow astronaut emerging from a familiar looking space capsule, the kind familiar to those who recall the aftermath of American moon landings. A caption has explained that the very rich had left Earth years earlier to colonize a far off planet called Kepler-9.

200 years later, having struggled with radiation that is now preventing the people of Kepler-9 from procreating, astronauts have returned to the abandoned Earth to see if the climate has returned to something habitable. This is not the first mission of its kind, Blake’s own father, seen in flashback and played by English character actor Sebastian Roche, was among the first to take the trip back to Earth only to never be heard from again.

The early scenes of The Colony are quickly paced and justify the use of captions as the first image of the movie. There is a load of backstory that would have been tiresome as dialogue and slowed what is a movie that lives on strong pacing. Recalling the early scenes of the 1960's Planet of the Apes, Arnezeder’s Blake and her astronaut colleagues find themselves unsure where they are and soon under siege by forces they don’t understand.

Here however, humans are still around and in charge though they no longer speak English, rather it’s some sort of simplistic pidgin language all their own. Unable to communicate with words, Blake wins some points with her medical training, saving the life of one of the men of the village. That this isn’t the first step in a romantic subplot was a welcome development. The men in The Colony are very much secondary to capable and tough minded women and where they aren’t, the plot indicates they soon will be.

The action of The Colony doesn’t rely on monsters or horrific violence, the scale is human, it’s about power and deceit. Humans may have changed but their motives remain the same, especially those of older men used to getting their own way, entitled and using violence to mask insecurity. These characteristics are embodied by the brilliantly shifty character actor Iain Gibson and his borderline feral minion, played with a glorious sneer by Swedish actor Joel Basman.

The Colony is not immune to the kind of cynicism that by nature of the word, dystopian, drives this kind of movie, but it’s not the heart of The Colony. Rather, the heart of The Colony is the capable, quick witted, intelligence of Blake. She’s a smart protagonist, fierce but not a badass, Blake succeeds as a character because she demonstrates resilience and resourcefulness. That Arnezeder is also charismatic and attractive helps, but it’s her canny decision making and the terrific pace and setting of The Colony that gets it past the cliches of dystopian fiction.

My only real issue with The Colony is the title. The Colony is already the title of a dozen different movies with a similar premise. Even more maddening though is that they had a really good title when the film was initially planned for release. Tides, which relates to the climate of the film's setting, is a great title that speaks to one of the dangerous and unique aspects of this particular future. The supposed 'Colony' isn’t even referred to as a ‘Colony’ in the movie.

That I have to reach that far to find something I truly dislike about The Colony is a testament to the film’s overall quality. The Colony arrives in limited theatrical release and streaming rental release on Friday, August 28th, 2021 from Saban Films.