The Colony (1998)

 

As prelude to a full-blown invasion of the Earth, a group of four aliens transplant their minds into human-like android bodies and infiltrate our society.  Their mission is to determine if humanity would make suitable slaves.  If not, the incoming armada will annihilate us.

The problem the aliens face is that some humans seem to make malleable slaves, and some don't.  The quartet wrangle over what this means, with some being happy to just have us annihilated, and others wanting to study us further to see if they can determine a means of enslaving us all.  The latter case wins out and they kidnap a group of humans for experimentation.

Of course, these human captives are not exactly pleased with this development.  They look for a way to escape, only to learn that they can't just save themselves: they also need to find a way to protect the whole planet.

Also known as The Advanced Guard, this is a made-for-basic-cable TV movie.  The effects and sets are every bit as cheap as you'd expect of such a project, but just as great sets and effects do not necessarily a good movie make, so the inverse can be true: a film can look bad but still be great entertainment.

That's not in the case with this film, though.  It's pretty much exactly the kind of film it looks like, and is a pretty lazy and cynical effort all round.

This film contains some of the most cynical nudity I've encountered in a film.  Every so often there's a (deliberately) poorly focused scene of a topless woman undulating her admittedly impressive body. These scenes have nothing to do with the rest of the movie and literally don't intersect with the plot or the film's events in any way.  As noted, the film was originally made for basic cable so I assume this a case of them being able to release an "uncut" version for the home video market.  This kind of thing used to happen a bit back in the late 90s.  In fact, the nude woman in this film went on to have a starring role in a TV show which used a similar gimmick for its pilot episode the very next year - The Lost World.  Though at least that show made some effort to integrate the nude scene as a part of the episode's actual events.

There is one potentially interesting feature to the film, but it squanders it.  That feature is the amount of focus given to the invading aliens as primary characters, rather than the humans they kidnap for study, especially in the film's first act.  These invaders are largely just working joes who primarily care about ticking off the performance targets their bosses have set for them, rather than would-be despots and conquerors.  I think this actually has the potential to be an interesting angle for a film to explore.  This is not going to be that film, though, as it doesn't use this feature to do anything other than engineer a situation of there being one "good" alien and three "bad" ones.

The creation of the "good" alien also leads to the script indulging in some pretty horrible treatment of the female human captive.  She is killed off screen and her body hijacked by the "good" alien, with an off-hand "It's both of us now, really" to try and disguise how gross that basically is.  Also, the fact that the alien can even do this is at odds with the rest of the script: the human-looking bodies that they occupied before this are explicitly artificial, not human at all, and "we struggle to affect human minds" has been a central factor of the plot.

You can safely skip this.