Official Trailer
Rating: 0/10 | Genre: Action, Thriller, Horror | Runtime: 123 min
Starring: Gianna Jun, Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, Shin Hyun-been, Kim Shin-rock
I walked into Colony hoping for a solid thriller. What I got was two hours of a movie that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be, and honestly, I’m still not sure if it was trying to scare me or put me to sleep.
The setup is promising enough. A biotech conference goes wrong when a virus gets released. The facility gets locked down. People start turning into these mutated versions of themselves. Gianna Jun plays Professor Se-jeong, who gets caught in the middle of it all. On paper, this works. It’s got the ingredients for a real nail-biter.
But here’s where things fall apart. The pacing is all over the place. There are stretches where nothing happens for what feels like forever, and then suddenly the movie cuts to a scene where people are already dead and we’re supposed to care. The editing is choppy in a way that feels unintentional. Like someone put this together without really thinking about how the scenes flow into each other.
Jun does the best she can with what she’s given. She sells the fear and desperation. But everyone else feels like they’re just reading lines. Koo Kyo-hwan and Ji Chang-wook are in this thing too, and they’re fine actors, but they have almost nothing to work with. The dialogue is stiff. Nobody talks like an actual person would in this situation.
The horror elements don’t land. The infected transformations should be disgusting. Should be terrifying. Instead they just look like bad makeup that you can see the edges of. There’s one scene where someone transforms and I was waiting to feel something. Anything. I just felt bored.
The 123 minute runtime is about 40 minutes too long. I kept checking my phone. Not because I was waiting for something good to happen, but because I was genuinely wondering when this was going to end. There’s dead space everywhere. Scenes that don’t matter. Conversations that go nowhere.
Look, I don’t go into movies expecting masterpieces. Sometimes a fun dumb action thriller is exactly what you need. This isn’t even that. It’s not fun. It’s not tense. It’s just kind of there, existing on screen and asking you to pay attention to it.
The 0/10 rating on TMDB makes sense to me now. I wouldn’t go that low myself because Jun tries and there are a couple of moments that almost work. But yeah, this one’s worth skipping. What’s a movie you went into with high hopes that completely disappointed you?
Where to Watch
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