Review of The Colony

Now, I love me some sci fi movies, yes'em I do. And the first half of this movie "The Colony" started out really good and thrilling! I was "all in" to the story. At a not too distant future, the Earth is in it's second Ice Age and the few humans that are left have moved underground to survive the bitter  cold and constant snow. So this one particular group called "the Colony" has taken over what appears to be some kind of multilevel warehouse storage facility. It has giant rooms and air conditioning. The Colony is run by Lawrence Fishburne who portrays a former military officer and now leader of the group. They have a ton of rules and grow their own plants and animals for food. The biggest problem these people have is illness. So if you start running a fever or get the sniffles and a cough, you immediately go into quarantine or you must be given a health test which if you fail it, you either must take a long walk in the snow or you get a bullet in the head. Ouch! hahahaha Apparently, they have had problems with people getting sick and infecting the whole Colony and then half the residents die. So Bill Paxton plays this hard as nails enforcer and if you get sick, he doesn't care if you take the test or not, he just wants to take you up top and shoot you between your eyes and kill you. Dayum! That's cold!!! This movie has a really good plot, the Colony gets a distress call from another settlement and now it's been like 8 hrs they cannot raise anyone from the other settlement at all. So Lawrence Fishburne wants to take a team and go check out the other settlement and see if they can help them. Sounds good, right? Well that part of the movie was really good, So Lawrence and his team of 2 set off walking to the other settlement. They come to a big bridge which is falling apart, there are giant holes in the cement roadway which is suspended on steel girders about 100 ft above a frozen river. They find a guy laying on the road next to a jeep, he's frozen solid and there are 2 females in the jeep also frozen solid. The man is holding a silver snub nosed revolver which they take. They keep going and soon end up at a helicopter on the side of the road. They spend the night there and radio back to the Colony letting them know where they are and that every thing is OK. So the next day they continue on their trek and soon reach the settlement, which is at the bottom of this giant silo. They immediately become concerned because there is blood right outside the entrance. But they climb down the ladder anyway. Once inside, they find more and more blood pools and splatter everywhere they look. They hear a pounding sound and cautiously continue deeper into the settlement, which looks like an old subway or train storage building. There are multiple sets of  tracks on the ground, giant columns,  mechanical stuff strewn around. So the pounding stops when they get close to this door that has a lot of scratch marks and dents on it. So one of the guys picks the lock and inside they find one lone man hiding inside. He warns them to lock the door and tells them it is not safe. He then tells them about a transmission he received via satellite from a group of people who claim to have gotten this environmental antenna contraption to work and they now have sun and dirt, but no seeds to plant. They invite everyone and anyone who receives this transmission to come to their spot and they give the longitude and latitude coordinates. Unfortunately, the transmission is of poor quality and it breaks up b4 they guy could get all of the coordinates to their location. But the settlement guy, says that they sent a team out to try and find it and they were unable to locate the "sunny spot", and when they returned something evil followed them home. It started attacking the settlers killing them one by one. Well he's unsure how many days he's been locked in that room, and he begs them for food and water, which they give him. Lawrence wants to take the guy and go, but he also wants to try and find out what or who is killing the settlers. So when they leave the room to investigate, the man they found inside slams the door shut and locks it again refusing to go with them. The pounding has started again, now Lawrence and his team follow the sounds down the hall to a large room and they find two guys chopping up the settlers for food. That's right, the "IT" that followed the settlers team back to the settlement is a group of cannibals. EWWWWW!!!!!! So instead of Lawrence and his team backing out quietly and leaving, one of them makes a sound and the 2 guys cutting up the bodies turns around and then gives a loud yell waking up the rest of his group who were sleeping on the floor. Lawrence and his team shoot some of the cannibals killing them, but there are just too many of them, at least 20 or 30 in total. And now the chase is on, one of the team members gets stabbed to death,  so now it's just Lawrence and this young cute blond guy, they are capping cannibals at every turn and make it back to the entrance,  at base of the long ladder down to the tunnels, there was a giant cement cube with another ladder that got you to the tunnel floor, about 12 feet high. So they climb the 12 ft ladder and Lawrence sends blond guy up the tall ladder he lights and then throws some dynamite at the cannibals and then starts hacking away at the 12 ft ladder trying to dislodge it. Eventually he does and now the cannibals are trapped in the tunnel. Or so we think. Once Lawrence gets to the top he lights another bundle of dynamite and tosses it down the silo, completely trapping the cannibals. Or so we think. Lawrence and Blondie take off walking and make it back to the downed helicopter. They barely make it inside b4 they look through their binoculars and see the cannibals heading for them. WTF! Apparently there must have been another way out of the tunnels and the cannibals either knew where it was or found it almost immediately! So Lawrence and Blondie head for the bridge, and half way across, Lawrence lights his final bundle of dynamite and places it in the middle of the bridge. Well, unfortunately for them, the wind blows out the fuse. and here is where the story starts to fall apart for me. First of all, if you know anything about these type of fuses used in dynamite, you know it is soaked in gun powder and once lite, unless you pour water on it or stamp it out, nothing is going put this type of fuse out lightly. So Lawrence runs back and tries to relight the fuse, but he is having trouble with his lighter, yeah yeah, so dramatic! He eventually gets it lite in the nick of time but cannot throw it so he blows up with it. So now the cannibals are trapped on the wrong side of the bridge and Blondie heads off back home to the Colony. I cannot believe that he went straight back there leaving nice foot prints in the snow!!!  So he gets back to the Colony and finds Bill Paxton outside about to execute 2 more colonists who appear to be sick with the flu or a cold. So they have some words, Blondie and Bill Paxton, then Blondie's girlfriend Kai comes up and pulls a gun on Bill Paxton's character. Bill doesn't care and shots the female in the head in the couple he brought up to execute killing her. When Kai sees her bf laying in the snow, she puts away her gun and runs out to him. Bill sneaks up behind her and when she turns to look at him, she whacks her in the head with the butt of his rifle. They all go back downstairs into the Colony and when the blond guy wakes up he starts telling them what happened and how they are not safe and need to leave immediately. At first no one believes him, but Bill tells the guy watching the security monitors to keep an extra eye out for any intruders. Well it doesn't take the cannibals long to find the colony. And they kill the lone guard that outside keeping vigil. Now this really pisses me off. When Lawrence blew the bridge there was at least a 20 foot wide hole in the middle of the bridge. There is NO WAY the cannibals could have jumped from one side to the other. And I don't believe they climbed down the frozen river and walked across and then climbed up the other side. But SOMEHOW the found a way across the deep ravine and found his trail and followed Blondie home with very little time lost at all. And now that they are at the Colony, they intend on killing and eating everyone there also. So they break in and start the killing. The colonists start fighting back and they are holding their own pretty good, but the cannibals are much better warriors than the colonists. Yawn! I didn't see that coming. hahahaha NOT! It just got so predictable. Eventually, Bill and many of the other colonists are killed. At the end it's just the blond guy, his gf Kai, and a few other adults and several children left alive and it appears that all of the cannibals have been killed but the colony was destroyed by fire and explosions. So Blondie tells everyone they need to head out to the sunny spot and he has some seeds he was able to grab and they start walking. And that's how the movie ended. What a big effing waste of time. We don't even know if they ever make it to the sunny spot. I seriously doubt it because they were not able to grab parkas and gloves and snow shoes, nor any food, any sleeping bags and tents nor a compass.I would have preferred that all of the colonists were killed by the cannibals rather than leave it up to my imagination that were able to walk to the sunny spot. (Rolls eyes). I am so glad that I didn't rent this movie, but was able to watch it on Starz for my regular monthly subscription. hahahahaha I give it 1.5 out of 5 stars.