Metacritic reviews

The Colony has modest rewards: It's decently acted, delivers some well-executed jolts, doesn't insult the viewer's intelligence, and is mercifully free of ironic distance.

The Colony is two-thirds of a pretty good sci-fi suspense movie. But it eventually takes a disappointing turn and becomes yet another run-from-the-ghouls exercise, cheapening decent work by a good cast.

Utterly routine futuristic horror-thriller The Colony substitutes the term “ferals” for plain old zombies (the modern, fast-moving kind), and that’s about it for originality.

Notwithstanding the efforts of a game cast, this is a grotesque miscalculation that disrespects the memory of those who perished in one of the darkest episodes in recent history by turning it into a piece of white-knuckle entertainment.

The problem is that the filmmakers' aversion to any hint of storytelling originality means that the main impression The Colony leaves is one of almost stupefying over-familiarity.

Can’t somebody come up with a monster that does something more interesting than run at you screaming, “Yeeaaaarrrrgh”?

There are a few nice scares in The Colony, and the female lead, Rookie Blue's Charlotte Sullivan, looks really, really cute in blond dreadlocks. But she can't save the movie, nor can her impressive costars, Bill Paxton, Kevin Zegers, and Laurence Fishburne.

The film strands its archetypal characters in a featureless danger zone and gives them overly familiar dialogue borrowed from a dozen other B-movies.

With a frost-bitten script whose skeletal plot cuts and pastes bits from innumerable other survival yarns, the biggest surprise the film offers is that four people were required to write it.

Greedily tries to cram every dystopian curse into one misbegotten plot, resulting in something wildly disjointed, even if its pieces arguably connect.