They say capturing lightning in a bottle once is hard enough—but doing it twice? Is it even possible? I’d say yes, it certainly is, but it will obviously be extremely difficult. The director of the much-beloved Korean zombie film Train to Busan tried to capture that lightning once again with Colony but ultimately fails, in my opinion. Colony is everything Train to Busan isn’t, and that can also be looked at in both a positive and negative light. What can a director do to differentiate the second movie from the previous one while also somehow retaining everything that everyone loved so much about it?

Colony certainly plays with an interesting idea when it comes to bioterrorism and infected individuals. The ability to create a colony or hive of zombie-like people who can share information among themselves and evolve to a higher level of learning over time gives the director a lot of room to play around with this concept. From the very beginning, we learn of the antagonist who is somehow responsible for this outbreak in a central business building and shopping center. We also learn that he is supposedly the only living vaccine to this infestation nightmare and therefore cannot be killed haphazardly, not if the good guys want a cure. Whoever captures him needs to choose between keeping him alive or putting a bullet right through him. He then injects his first victim with the material, and away we go!

I think Colony tried a bit to copy the story formula of Train to Busan in that we get to see a couple of different people’s backstory prior to the outbreak. In Train to Busan, we learn of a father’s love for his little daughter and his determination to protect her at all costs as the story progresses. In Colony, we see the main female professor and her ex-husband’s story. We then see a couple of others, such as the security guard’s brotherly love for his disabled sister, along with a couple’s bullying of a friend. Here is where I think it just broke down: I didn’t care about any of them emotionally. The main female character just didn’t do anything where I’m heavily and emotionally invested in her outcome. In Train to Busan, audiences I’m sure were absolutely crushed when they learned of the dad’s fate. I can still remember the emotional ending where the woman and little girl were walking through the tunnel and finally being saved by human soldiers. Suffice it to say, there’s not much of that going on here and, for the most part, it kind of seemed that way as the movie slowly progressed. The characters did things to advance from Point A to B and of course having some die along the way either due to sheer stupidity or bad luck, but for the most part, the movie lacked that secret sauce that somehow makes a movie or its characters special or memorable after the credits roll.

There are a couple things that’s worth pointing out. For one, I understand in these types of outbreak survival movies, there’s bound to be that one person in the group that will eventually either drag the group down at some point or betray them. That one girl here, the one who bullied her other girl friend, I counted no less than five frigging times in which she messed up. 😂 Like OMG come on! Next, I don’t understand why the group couldn’t just knock bro unconscious at certain point. Sure, they’d have to drag his deadweight to the roof but I’m just surprised this didn’t happen. They learned he is able to control the hive via sight and sound and not only did they just blindfolded him, they treated him like royalty. I get they believed he was the vaccine at the time but they could have at least discussed knocking him out cold. 😭 Next up, they were only supposed to communicate via text messages but of course, they broke that rule immediately.

Last but not least, Colony definitely overstayed its welcome. It absolutely has no business being two hours long, because after a certain point, all the zombies and killings felt purely unnecessary to flesh the plot out any further. Things got a bit cringey once the villain started to gain control of his horde. The ending, I think, made sense. It tied back to an earlier explanation by the professor about an ant mill. She threw the shirt with the scent on a zombie; this zombie, in turn, was confused and started to run in a circle, which led other zombies to run in a circle, creating the swirl effect. The horde boss was no longer able to control them and, pissed as he was, threw the jacket off the first zombie. However, the zombies were now too overwhelmed and basically got factory-reset to their initial dumb state and, because of this, the boss got crushed and caught on fire. I’m not exactly sure why he wasn’t able to control them again, though. Earlier, I believe he was able to control them only after he got bitten by one of them. He was, however, able to still see/read/experience what the zombies did prior to getting bitten, as evidenced in the elevator scene when he told the older guy how cool he was sliding on the floor and whatnot. That sliding scene happened when he was still locked up in the room. However, I didn’t catch the requirement of what actually makes the infected controllable other than the boss having been bitten. Did the infected have to get up to a certain level or gain some type of basic experience points on their own before they are controllable and that when reset to factory default, they immediately are not?

I have to assume that the moral of the story here is that the zombie boss was right in a way: imperfect communication can lead to disaster. We see this multiple times with the humans, but we also witness that when they are in sync, they can achieve much more. One example is when the security guard’s sister gave them navigational directions. Another is when the other female researcher gave our main female MC driving directions to the boss. I also have to believe that humanity can overcome this tragedy by working together in sync to come up with a vaccine, because as soon as the camera started to zoom in right at the end, you just had to know what was coming. 😂 😂 Conversely, the boss lost because he lost control of his horde—aka imperfect communication. I think? I believe all the people saying to skip this movie are being a bit too dramatic. Yes, it will never hold up to Train to Busan for those of us who treasured that movie, like myself, but Colony is still at least worth a watch for zombie and virus outbreak fans. Finally, I can fathom how much fun the people playing the zombies had on set while filming this movie. 🤣 🤣