The Colony

This is a film made in Europe, so naturally the score of 5 on Imdb translates to an actual 8 if you think about it a little. The acting is great - even the children, the story makes sense, the direction is good, the atmosphere well thought out and the movie well executed. And that on a budget that is probably orders of magnitude smaller than an American film.

Earth is made uninhabitable by people, so the elite just leave it behind and move to another planet. However, the joke's on them, as they lose all reproductive ability there, so they need to come back. The story is about this woman who is the sole survivor of a survey mission and who discovers people still live on Earth, including earlier surveyors. The action is well done, the characters believable and, other than a rather disappointing finale, it's a pretty good film. There are themes of racial supremacy, protecting the Earth and a general moral that ethics are important and the means are not justified by the end.

Bottom line: I recommend it. It's not perfect, it has its flaws, but overall it does exactly what it set out to do and does it well.

There was not even one detail about this movie that is logical, scientifically correct or even plausible. It is as if the producers found an unsold script in their great grandfather's trunk and decided to make it into a movie without any updating.

The world is wet, covered in perpetual mist, there is almost no color and everything is miserable and rotten.

I became fed up past the first thirty minutes and then spent the next fifteen clicking the 'Jump Ahead 10 Seconds' button looking for key scenes in order to see if things got any less dreary and dull, and to get an idea of the story thesis.

I can report that the sets become more interesting, (rotted big ships from a previous age form a depressing community), and there is something of a developing mystery in the story, featuring fascist leadership and poor waifs, etc. However, even with the power of "Skip Ahead" at my disposal, I found I just didn't care enough to see how the miserable tale played itself out.

Perhaps I've been spoiled, my brain re-wired by a diet of high-speed flashy films and peppy story lines. Maybe slow and dreary and damp are your thing. If so, this film is for you.

As for the thesis...

This film offers a vision of the world from the perspective of Climate Change alarmism. -Which is hard to take if you know anything about how C02 works on plant life; (you don't get endless mud flats and too much water), but who cares about science or facts? -Not the writers, who evidently envision advanced space faring humans capable of removing our species to a distant star system as apparently NOT capable of engineering a landing craft which doesn't look like an ancient Apollo capsule and which doesn't immediately sink to the bottom of the ocean upon touchdown and kill its occupants. Even in the 1960's we knew how to make more reliable space ships.

Tides offers lots of dreary 'feels' which don't care about your facts. Otherwise, the production values and acting were above average and the film made good use of a limited budget.

6/10 because honest craft went into this production.

Wow, I don't think I have seen a film in the past few years with more clichés packed into the dialogue. And there is a lot of yacking in this film, so the clichés and predictable conversation becomes overwhelming.

And for Sci Fi one expects to suspend disbelief on even core elements, but one does not expect more plot holes than a sieve. A civilization that is doing interstellar travel hundreds of years more advanced than 2020 space efforts, but doesn't have landing technology of 1960's Mercury or Soviet Vostok????

Lastly, the acting except for Ian Glenn is atrocious, cringeworthy.

Lack of clarity in the story robs this of its potential. Some questions are never resolved. One big plot hole involves the immense distance to the extrasolar colony in the Kepler 209 system. At 587 pc (1,914 light years), they would have to have FTL technology. And if they had FTL technology, they would likely have chosen something far, far closer to Earth. Better than that, with the right use of FTL tech, they could have terraformed Mars in a few decades.

Great acting, nice cinematography, but pacing seemed too slow in places. A movie like Das Boot could make boredom seem interesting. That time of deep creativity was missing, here.