In the past few months, Earth’s ultra-rich have gleefully demonstrated that they’ve had their escape route off this doomed rock planned for some time. With the recent spate of rich-guy space flights, Tim Fehlbaum’s The Colony – a film about wealthy Earthlings fleeing the planet they’ve killed while leaving the poor behind to die – may come at an apt time, but fails to truly drive home what should be an absolutely terrifying concept.
Although The Colony is something of an amalgamation of films that better tread post-apocalyptic ground, as a strict actioner it mostly works. The problem arises when the issues of wealth inequality, colonization, and eugenics are added into the mix and don’t pay off. It would be one thing if these weighty ideas were properly explored, but they aren’t, which leaves the whole affair feeling rather airless. The ideas are there for the plucking, but unfortunately they are left hanging on the tree.
None of this is to say that The Colony has no worth. The lead performances by Nora Arnezeder and Iain Glen serve the story just fine, and the pseudo-fascist, manifest destiny-tinged viewpoint of the film’s colonizer antagonists are as grim as they are historically accurate (not to mention disturbingly prescient). But the latter – and infinitely more interesting – is underdeveloped, creating a wobbly balance between action and concept that neither can fully recover from. Fehlbaum introduces us to a fascinating “what if” scenario that entertains more than it doesn’t, but ultimately leaves us with only an impression of a much larger picture.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.