Director – Tim Fehlbaum, Screenplay – Tim Fehlbaum & Mariko Minoguchi, Co-Written by Jo Rogers & Tim Trchte, Producers – Tim Fehlbaum, Philipp Trauer, Ruth Waldburger & Thomas Wöbke, Photography – Markus Förderer, Music – Lorenz Dangel, Visual Effects Supervisor – Denis Behnke, Visual Effects – Scanline VFX (Supervisors – Jan Krupp & Berter Orpak), Special Effects – Star Effects (Supervisor – Jan Singh), Makeup Effects – Twilight Creations, Production Design – Julian R. Wagner. Production Company – Berghauswöbke Filmproduktion/Vega Film/Constantin Film/Studio Babelsberg/SRF Swiss Radio and Television/SRG-SSR.
The Earth has become uninhabitable as a result of climate change, pandemics and war. Most of humanity has relocated to the planet Kepler 209, but this requires living in an environment dome where radiation has made people infertile. After automated weather stations back on Earth report regeneration of the environment, The Ulysses Project is mounted to return to Earth to investigate. When the crew fails to report back, a second mission is sent but makes a crashlanding. Louise Blake is the sole survivor but is captured by the strange tribes that remain on Earth, making their home in an old abandoned cargo ship.
The Colony was a co-production between Germany’s Constantin Film, Studio Babelsberg and Swiss studios where it was clearly intended as a prestige production. It is executive produced by Roland Emmerich, the director of films like Stargate (1994), Independence Day (1996) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004). In the actual director’s seat is Swiss director Tim Fehlbaum, whose previous film was the also Roland Emmerich-produced Global Warming film Hell (2011).
The Colony is a variant on the Planetary Adventure in which astronauts land on a planet and explore the world and usually encounter its unique flora and fauna. There is a subset of these films about astronauts returning to Earth many years later after it has undergone some type of catastrophe – see the likes of Planet of the Apes (1968) through Strange New World (1975) to After Earth (2013) and Colonials (2023).
(Louise Blake) Nora Arnezeder makes a return to an abandoned Earth
The catastrophe here seems a mix of everything from pandemics, which was overwhelming the world with Covid-19 at the time that The Colony was being made, to Global Warming, a recurring concern in several of Roland Emmerich’s films. Although with the remnants of some kind of future culture spread out along a beach, what the film resembles more than anything is something of the Polish SF film On the Silver Globe (1988).
Tim Fehlbaum creates an impressive world – all grey beaches stretching off into infinity, figures appearing out of the mist, and especially the remnants of future humanity having taken shelter in giant beached cargo ships, which have been transformed into miniature cities. The film seems filled with great promise during the early scenes as we gradually get glimpses of this amid Nora Arnezeder being taken prisoner and her flight for survival. On the other hand, the latter half of the film far less interestingly telescopes down to merely being a fight over the internal politics of the survivors and loses that head of steam.
The Colony should not be confused with The Colony (2013), which is also a post-apocalyptic work set in a frozen future.
