The Colony
A film like “The Colony” is looking at a new way to present well-worn material, and one of the most important things it can do is present images that are striking and evocative. In Tim Fehlbaum’s movie, the Earth has been decimated by war, pandemics and our general disregard for it. The wealthiest humans have made their way into space on a mission to a colony, Kepler 209. We never see Kepler 209 in the film, but hear enough about it to understand the predicament they are in, and why they might try to find a way back to Earth. Is Earth prepared for such a return? That’s what “The Colony” sets out to answer.
The film begins with a crash landing in the ocean. The capsule contains the crew of Ulysses 2, the second attempt by the people of Kepler 209 to explore and see if Earth is inhabitable again- Ulysses 1 failed shortly after the landing. One of the crew members dies shortly after impact, leaving Tucker (Sope Dirisu) and Blake (Nora Arnezeder). They are able to find land, but it’s basically sand with a layer of water above it. The images of this terrain captured by Fehlbaum and cinematographer Markus Förderer are haunting and beautiful, even if they eventually give way to a civilization out of “Waterworld” or “Mad Max” that we’ve seen dozens of times before. Soon, Tucker and Blake find themselves in the middle of what the elite left behind on Earth.
This sort of survival thriller predicates itself on the narrative hook being compelling almost more than the characters being interesting. In “The Colony,” the survival of humanity rests on both Earth’s ability to sustain life, and humanity’s ability to create new life. On Kepler, it appears the latter is not possible, so one of the things Blake and Tucker are doing is checking for the potential to reproduce in lifeforms they encounter. A key is a child Blake meets in Maila (Bella Bading) who will be taken from her mother by the people who control life in this area (led by “Game of Thrones’s” Iain Glen), whom may or may not be aware of a secret that will shock Blake. Fehlbaum and his co-writers do a good job of building the story, but there’s not much new they are able to bring to the ideas that we have not seen before. If the film had built off of its initial few minutes with a more compelling moral dilemma being at the center (maybe involving class structure and how the people Blake meet were just left for death) there might have been something more to explore here. By the end, however, it hits the familiar beats, and hasn’t really delivered a continuation of its early, rich visual palette, resulting in a murky, familiar landscape with a story we’ve seen before at the center. “The Colony” starts well, but maybe it wasn’t meant to sustain long-term.
