Colonials

A space colonist crash lands on Earth and joins forces with a resistance to save the galaxy from human extinction.

As that incredibly generic synopsis indicates… Colonials is 81 minutes of shitty green-screen sci-fi.

The CGI is this film is so so incredibly bad.

It’s not like Colonials is big studio film or anything, so it’s not like I had high expectations, but it’s so bad, it’s noteworthy. It’s 90s era home computer videogame cut-scene CGI bad. It’s first season Babylon 5 CGI bad. And the worst part is? They showcase it. It’s constantly on screen, this incredibly shitty and cheap-looking CGI, because the film leans so very heavily on it. There’s whole action set pieces that take place in front of a green screen that would embarrass a Weatherman. On top of that, it’s terribly written too. Clunky, dull, terminally unfunny, bloated with clichés and unearned character development, it’s just bad, a boring idea told poorly, all delivered by a cast who look as if they were all drawn from the same “maybe I should’ve been a JC Penny’s catalog model instead of an actor” casting pool.

In short, Colonials is embarrassingly amateur on every level.

Having worked in an independant video store that bought everything that was released, regardless of where it fell on the quality spectrum, I am shocked to discover that people still make these terrible little backyard vanity projects. Bad low budget films are one thing, in fact, they’re a staple of cinema, but films like Colonials belong to a weirder group.

Films like Colonials very obviously have decent mid-sized budgets. Even if the CGI, costumes, and props are all terrible, there’s still real money ineeded to get them. And looking at the film, there’s five digits on screen easy, probably more like six, because technical resources aren’t cheap. Neither are props. Neither are locations. Neither are the cast and crew, because while these people are all very much untalented, they’re all obviously being paid to be there. This isn’t a bunch of friends and a camcorder on an off weekend. So, yeah, there’s actual money involved here, a not insignifigant amount of technical and support resources, but the problem is, there is also an absolute dearth of creative ones, the kind of things money sometimes can’t buy.

This is probably why these kind of weirdly well-funded and terrible films are also usually absurdly ambitious—stupidly ambitious—at the same time, packed with the kind of stories and ideas more commonly found in the big multi-million dollar Studio blockbusters, the kind of things that are obviously unobtainable for filmmakers at this level, and yet… there they are, so like a 5 year old jumping to grab the moon, they can only miss. And they do. Always.

It’s almost sad that they even made the attempt.

Is there a movie-specific version of the saying “Their eyes were too big for their stomachs?” There should be. If there were, that would be films like Colonials.

This kind of ill-advised face-plant of a genre film is fine in the short film world, where any potential financial losses are, at least comparatively, minimal, but this is a feature film. Thousands and thousands of dollars? Potentially even more? Millions? That’s so much money to just… set on fire. Especially now, what with video stores gone the way of the dodo, and the straight-to-video market a thing of the past… how do these kind of weirdly well-funded garbage movies even have a hope of making any of that money back? They’re certainly not seeing a wide theatrical release anywhere. The occasional two dollar rental, after delving into the trash heap lying at the bottom of the Amazon Prime options, can’t be stretching that far.

And what kind of fool would look at this project, and the people involved, and then turn around and front that much cash? Is it their parents’ money? It is, isn’t it? God, that’s sad. Or… are these kinds of films, as some have suggested, nothing more than money-laundering scams?

Whatever the answer, Colonials is a straight-up terrible film.