The Colony (2013)

Jeff Renfroe's The Colony arrives from 2013, a Canadian production that surveyed the post-apocalyptic landscape and found most of it already picked over. The premise concerns climate modification towers, built to cool a warming planet, which instead usher in a new ice age. That is a durable irony, and the film spends roughly ninety seconds on it before retreating underground with Laurence Fishburne, Kevin Zegers and Bill Paxton to fight cannibals. The environmental material serves as a plot catalyst, not a sermon. No character pauses to lecture us about carbon sins, which is a small mercy in a genre that rarely grants them.

The cast is reasonably mixed, and the film makes no event of it. Fishburne and Lisa Berry hold the frame with authority while the script asks them only to survive. Race is never a subject, never a subtext, never a conversation. Kai and Nara each get a moment of spine, an argument or a well-placed shove, but the machinery belongs to the men and the film has no thesis to advance about it. There are no LGBTQ characters, no meditation on class or wealth, nothing on the body, nothing on the mind's variations, and the year 2045 is invented outright, so history remains unrevised. What we have is cold, cannibals, and a dwindling food supply. The conflict is elemental, and the film treats it that way.

Critics at the time were unkind, and the Rotten Tomatoes consensus of eighteen percent suggests they found the whole exercise recycled. They were not wrong. The dialogue clanks, the characters are half-drawn, and the snow looks authentically miserable throughout, which is presumably the point. And yet the thing moves with a certain grim competence, and the climate premise, delivered flatly as exposition, does land its quiet warning about good intentions and frozen consequences. A modest specimen. Not preachy, not progressive, not much of anything except chilly, and occasionally that is sufficient.