Ten years after Train to Busan put a train full of sprinting infected on a KTX express, Yeon Sang-ho has made another zombie movie, and he's changed what the zombies are. Colony opened in US theaters on Friday, August 28th through Well Go USA. Its infected run too, but the speed is no longer the scary part. They think together.
"What is the horror and fear of today's world?" Yeon put it that way to Screen Daily, then answered himself: "In modern society, there is fear around the high-speed exchange of communication, which creates a collective intelligence."
The infected share a neural network, so what one sees, they all see. Hiding stops working. Outrunning one means outrunning the group's memory of you. And when a single one adapts, every one of them has already adapted too!
Yeon built that idea physically, hiring contemporary dancers rather than stunt performers and giving them an instruction he recounted to Daily Dead: "I don't want you guys to move as one entity. Imagine when you play a piano, just like one piano, but you are using 10 fingers, and all 10 fingers touch and play different keys."
He has also described the shared consciousness as "like a living organism and a kind of AI."
Yeon told Daily Dead his team drew on "the extremely high-speed internet, the information exchange through social networking, as well as the emergence of the highly-developed AI," and framed it as a continuation of Hellbound, which "showed a lot of the danger of people going toward this collectivity."
Then there's what a hive mind costs. "This universality is to the detriment of minority thoughts," he told Screen Daily. "There is a fear this will cause the minority to be diminished." And a thing with no internal disagreement has a weakness: "Any creature living that way is very vulnerable to external threats because they lack diversity. So, as a result, they develop this tendency to mutate constantly to protect themselves."
So the swarm keeps mutating because being identical is what makes it fragile. The same thing that makes these zombies vulnerable is what keeps making them worse.
He brings up the comparison himself. "In a way, Colony is a way to revisit Train To Busan 10 years later, but with a different gaze based on how I have changed," he said.
Colony is a standalone film, even though the marketing puts his name front and centre. It shares no story with Train to Busan, Seoul Station, or Peninsula. Gianna Jun stars as a professor trapped inside a sealed biotech conference when the outbreak starts, alongside Koo Kyo-hwan, Ji Chang-wook, and Go Soo, across a 122-minute runtime.
Reviews out of Fantasia, where the film had its Canadian premiere in July, have been warm. Rue Morgue's Michael Gingold called the action "varied and ferociously staged" and said it's worth catching on a big screen, while conceding the plot is less groundbreaking than its predecessor's. The budget was about $12 million, which is cheap for a movie with this many zombies moving in formation.
It's in theaters now, and Train to Busan came back to screens for its 10th anniversary earlier this month, so you can watch both and see for yourself what ten years did to his zombies.
What did Yeon get right about how we live now?
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