The Colony :: SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board

Just saw this film w/ Laurence Fishburne and Bill Paxton on VOD. I later learned that it was released theatrically earlier this year in Canada, where it was filmed. The CG backdrops and other effects are nice and the general premise of the movie is enough to hook you in. Man makes machines that controled the weather. The machines break malfunction and create a global man-made ice age. Food is scarce, chickens and rabbits are dying out. Plants under makeshift underground greenhouses aren't growing fast enough. The bees still produce honey I guess (?) If that were not all, some colonists are having mental breakdowns and if you catch a cold (sneezing, coughing) you could be quarantined for a few days and if you don't get better they give you a choice: execution or expulsion. It's always snowing and the windchill is in the minuses

How I would have loved to see that movie.

Instead, the majority of that is all told to me in a clunky voice-over. Kevin Zegers provides it and he plays the lead character, Sam. We meet Briggs (Fishburne) who leads the colony and Mason, who now wants more control of the outpost. Mason is now to the point where he wants to ignore the 'rules' of giving the sick a choice. He simply guns them down.

There was a "horror tease" at the start of the film and a score to make it sound like Ennio Morricone's score from John Carpenter's The Thing. I was willing to forgive it. I liked this setup a lot. When there's some sort of distress call from another 'outpost'  I was curious ..., and they never address it. If this is 'outpost five' and the call is from outpost 7, where's number six? Is there an outpost 4? But then, I rembered ah...they use a bit of 'The Thing' score clone. We're living in what remains of the human race in these scattered 'underground outposts' and the "sick" may have rebelled and went ape shit crazy and who can you trust!

well, not exactly.

See, Briggs, Sam and volunteer Greydon (Atticus Dean Mitchell) go on a trek through the never ending blizzard to find out why they lost contact with outpost 7. But three plot holes slap you hard in the face: if it is constantly snowing, why isn't the ground covered in a least ten to twenty inches of the stuff, why isn't landmarks and buildings more buried and, oh yeah, what happened to outpost six? We get to a bridge where there is hardly any snow on it but it's so frozen with ice that nobody slips or slides, but rather, it's decayed the bridge. Lots of gaping holes. Parts of it are as study as styrofoam. Visually it is intresting. But it also makes a major no-no. In creating a sci-fi world where rules are set, you cannot break those rules. The movie did just that.

At this point, I was sad I didn't get more exploration into the underground colony. There's a shot of an indoor glass beekeeping colony and I felt really robbed as I would have loved a scene where some of these survivors who have these 'jobs' of growing plants and taking care of animals (presumambly for food) also were beekeppers and how the freakin' bees found flowers/plants to pollenate.
  I mean there's a number of shots that have the bees...Iwhat I'm saying overall is that I want to know how things work in these places. I want to know how far the paranoia goes. If one person attempts to hide a brief bout with the common cold (strongly established) and they sneeze near the food and water rations, will people have a fear of these friends and/or the needs for survival.

But since the three characters are headed to a place where we know something's wrong (as evidenced by the teaser) then the most obvious but satisfying answer awaits us. What happened to outpost seven will most likely happen to the other one.

I would have loved to have seen that.

WE soon discover what happened to outpost seven. They found a transmission where supposedly another outpost fixed up one of those old machines and have thier little utopia with green grass and the like. (think of it like the hidden jungle packed away from a nuclear wasteland Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome) We are told (!) that some folks from outpost seven went to check it out but on the way there they brought "something back with them". Turns out it's a group of nomadic-like cannibals who point and moan at you like the Pod People. They are led by the Feral leader (Dru Viergever, who is effective in looking like a 30 Days Of Night outcast) and just when our heroes manage to barely escape, these ~~zombies~~ ~~vampires~~ cannibals hunt them. They follow the tracks (nevermind about the thing about snowining all the time, artic wind etc) and then there's a standoff on the bridge where one of our heroes sacrifices himself to blow the rest of the bridge up.

Upon returning back, Sam witnesses Mason killing more of the sick again. Mason is now in charge and rules the colony with an Orwellian mindset. Sam's styory isn't believed. He's knocked out, him and his g/f are tied up in different rooms. One of the colonists who likes Sam frees him. Sam thinks that the cannibals will eventaully find Colony five. It  doesn't take that long. So much for Mason's paranoid villany.

At this point it's a mash up of 30 Days Of Night, Day Of The Dead, Pandorum,
among others and it pissed me off. Why? The cannibals don't bust open the beehives. They don't try to snack on the last of the rabbits. Someone even throws a chicken at 'em. They appear to wipe out 90% of THe Colony (only five people are left) in less than ten minutes. (or the colony had only ten people left IN the outpost)

No, dammit. If you start the movie with a thought provoking concept and sell that, you DON'T dump it out like yesterday's garbage. If you are going to use paranoia USE IT and pay it off in spades. What is this shit?

There's something that Paxton's character said early on that I recalled. The reason why he kills the ill in cold blood (literally). Mason suggests that those sick that are exiled "always come back". A survivior of Outpost seven (used mostly for exposition) says 'our scouts brought something with them". So now I'm not sure where this Feral cannibal group came from. How they all got pointy teeth. How they can't talk anymore, just scream, grunt and groan.

Not that I really cared. But if I wrote this, I would have at least suggested that a) the sick that went into exiile found the paradise which had a side effect of mutating them and b) they did return, as vampire-like cannibal mutants/monsters and had to be defended against. This makes sense according to the rules set up. But then again, after doing some background checks I found out that it was written by FOUR people, including the director, most likely the last one to touch it.

I wonder what the original script by Patrick Tarr & Pascal Trottier looked like (they were also credited with "story" so that tells me the end product strayed away from the original sale of the script) and I'll bet my above explanation is probably very close to what it actually was in previous drafts. I'll bet odds on it.

Loads of potential. Wasted.
What a shame.