I was lucky enough to check out the new zombie movie from director Yeon Sang-ho. He is known as the director for Train to Busan and Peninsula. I know this is a bit of departure from what I normally review but I am a zombie movie fan with Dawn of the Dead and most of the 28 Days Later movies have been some of my favourites after checking the amazing All of Us Are Dead on Netflix and wanting to check out  Asian cinema outside of anime and Japanese live action I could not let this opportunity pass.

Our movie starts in a high-rise with our protagonists Professor Se-jeong and her ex husband Han Gyu-sung are attending a biotech conference. They are both enjoying the awkward small talk that would come with this situation before your generic CEO boasting that he is about to make the next step in human evolution and nothing is dodgy about his work and nothing bad is going to happen wink wink nudge nudge. After his talk he is confronted by the man Young-chul who he has stolen the work of this leads to Young-chul injecting a mysterious green slime into the CEO making him zombie patient zero. Within minutes, a full zombie outbreak has taken over the high-rise and now making its way down to the lower levels. That is a shopping centre full of pedestrians and everyday people.

Both Han Gyu-sung and Se-jeong make it through the zombie attack back down to the mall area but find themself blocked by a horde of zombie. They soon link up with other survivors in the mall but they have one huge issue — the Korean military have locked down the building, not wanting the infection to spread further. The group are now trapped and will have to find out the mystery of this Outbreak and survive a whole building worth of zombies?

Colony does have some interesting ideas with some newer takes on a zombie movie using some real life science to make this sound like something that could happen in reality, making these zombies that little bit more terrifying with some interesting civilian characters like  Choi Hyun-seok, a security guard at the mall who has his older sister, Hyun-hee, a wheelchair user visiting him at the time of the outbreak. These two do add a lot of human charm to this movie and gives this movie a more interesting angle. 

Colony does have a lot of good idea but I feel like I have seen a lot of them done better in other projects. When you are setting your zombie movie in a mall you are always going to be compared to Dawn of the Dead (1978) to this day that film is absolute masterclass in zombie movies and uses the setting of a zombie outbreak in a mall way better than Colony does. I have also seen the real life science angle done before in movies like 28 Weeks Later to better affect. I enjoy the idea of someone being able to control and walk with the zombies but yet again I have seen this done to better effect in the Netflix series All of us are Dead. That I would recommend over Colony for that Korean zombie fix.

Overall Colony does have interesting ideas sadly I feel that other movies did them better. Worth an afternoon at the cinema! If you are a zombie movie fan Colony is in Uk cinemas right now thanks to STUDIOCANAL

Thanks again to Fetch publicity for the invite to the press screening and to Rebecca Harrison for helping me edit this review.

You can check out what Asian movie are heading to cinema right here