With the global craving for Korean genre entertainments showing no sign of abating, it can’t be easy to be a filmmaker tasked with feeding the beast with ever bigger, better, bonecrunching-er novelties. And that must go double for a director like Yeon Sang-ho who, with 2016’s “Train to Busan,” previously gnawed into the throat of the fast-zombie subgenre and instantly infected it with new, ravenous energy. Ten years, an animated prequel (“Seoul Station”) and a disappointing live-action sequel (“Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula”) later, Yeon returns to action-horror with “Colony” an entertaining if empty-headed exercise in familiarity, with a few neat new tricks up its bloodstained, gore-flecked sleeve.
Firstly though, let’s quickly dispense with the perennial argument over whether we can call these particular post-human cannibalistic freaks “zombies” given that they’re technically infected rather than dead — because yes, we can. And frankly, that kind of pedantry will not serve you well if you’re seeking to enjoy a movie as determinedly resistant to close-read intellectual analysis as “Colony,” where things happen just because they do, destruction occurs just because it can and people get horribly chomped-and-changed because, as crunchily choreographed (by “Train to Busan” zombie-transformation maven Jeon Young) and as impressively performed by a highly contortionist troupe of writhing, spasming, body-popping dancers, it is very good fun to watch.
“Colony” is for some reason not part of the “Train” universe, and perhaps in an effort to set it apart — and to give the outbreak both a human face and some form of human, albeit batshit, motivation — here the virus that causes all the mayhem is a man-made weapon of terror. Its architect, Seo Young-cheol (Koo Kyo-hwan) is the exact combo of clever, devious and disgruntled that is the making of many a movie villain, and has been using the time since he was fired from his job with biotech giant Chains Bio to formulate his dastardly revenge.
It is the day of a big Chains Bio conference, to which scientist Han Kyo-seong (Go Soo) has brought his ex-wife Kwon Se-jeong (popular Korean star Gianna Jun) with the aim of helping her land a job. A brilliant biochemist whose prickly, won’t-play-nice-with-others attitude means she keeps rubbing potential employers the wrong way, Se-jeong is surly and snarky. Immediately, we like her a lot. The pair get a brief audience with the Chains Bio CEO, before he is called away and promptly injected, by baddie Young-cheol, with a highly infectious zombifying serum. As boss-man turns into a cantering, slavering, apparently all-over treble-jointed ghoul, Young-cheol announces that his own living blood contains the only antidote. So he cannot be killed if there’s ever to be hope of synthesizing a vaccine.
Bite to bite, the outbreak spreads like wildfire out from the conference center which is located, in the best George Romero tradition, in a shopping mall — as if the brick-and-mortar retail sector weren’t having a bad enough time of it already. Se-jeong and Kyo-seong get caught in the ensuing chaos, and end up leading an ever-dwindling band of stock characters: a frazzled policeman, a bullied teenage girl, her vacuous mean-girl tormentor and her sneering boyfriend, and an off-duty security guard (Ji Chang-wook), who is touchingly devoted to his wheelchair-user sister (Kim Shin-rok).
With the authorities outside paralysed into inaction, at least until another sciencey boffin shows up to lead the external hunt for a cure — in a massive contrivance, she happens to be Kyo-seong’s current wife (Shin Hyun-been) — the survivors understand that no rescue is coming. And so they have to “Towering Inferno” their own way through multiple levels of zombie-infested storefronts, back offices and passageways to reach safety.
This is complicated by “Colony”‘s biggest narrative innovation: this virus has been engineered to allow the infected to communicate with each other like a colony of ants. When one of them learns something, it can be passed on to them all, via a very cool, creepy “Body-Snatchers”-esque maneuver that temporarily freezes them in a silent screaming posture as new info is downloaded. This means that no two sets of zombies can be bested in quite the same way, because as soon as one of their weaknesses is identified — initially, for example, the dumb-ass hordes cannot differentiate between real humans and their representations as poster advertisements or store mannequins — the hive mind is upgraded to eradicate that particular bug.
The inter-human drama, however, is less interestingly drawn. And regular visitors to the zombie Yeon-iverse will recognise the director’s trademark pessimism when it comes to how readily he believes people will abandon or betray each other if it means even slightly improving our own survival odds. A surprisingly sweet alliance develops between two smart women who have both been married to the same man, which makes a nice change from the Korean genre staple of a businessman protagonist whose entire emotional arc is his dawning realization that he should maybe spend more time with his kids. But aside from that, Yeon and co-writer Choi Gyu-seok stick to the pre-established script of being ruthless when it comes to who they’ll kill off, and scathing in their assessment of humanity’s capacity for heroism.
There’s a lot of talk of evolution here. Stone-faced madman Young-cheol believes that his telepathically (or pheremonically) linked progeny mark a giant leap up for a species whose chief design flaw is that our thoughts and behaviors cannot be centrally monitored and controlled. But “Colony” itself is only a small step forward for this ever-mutating genre, mashing up the disaster movie, the Z-horror canon, the Borg episodes of “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and even some design elements from “Aliens” to make its mindless, misshapen, mucus-extruding monsters a perfectly adequate placeholder until someone — put your money on Yeon Sang-ho — invents a next-gen zombie that can fly.
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