THE DIVIDE (2011)

As far back as I could remember, I always wanted to be a survivor. And I’m not talking about surviving some reality show. I mean surviving when everyone else was dead. Surviving the End of the World.

My favourite movie from a very young age was Charlton Heston’s THE OMEGA MAN. I imagined myself as the Last Man on Earth, and in the summer days I would wake up at the crack of dawn and go bicycling in my neighbourhood, prowling through the city streets pretending I was foraging for supplies and avoiding albino mutants. I suppose it’s a modern extension of the old Robinson Crusoe fantasy: being free to act as I wanted, but having access to all the modern conveniences – and without having to pay for them.

I devoured movies like MAD MAX and its thousand bastard Italian and Filipino offspring, as well as DAMNATION ALLEY, LOGAN’S RUN, and many others. I was also aware of the more serious ones that emerged in the early 80s: THE DAY AFTER, THREADS, TESTAMENT. They captured the apocalyptic zeitgeist of the 80s, during the last cusp of the Red Scare with the accompanying threat of Doomsday, and they did it without a gas-scavenging punk-haired mutant in sight. They were serious, and realistic, and they had messages to impart to the audience. I understood that, even if I wasn’t mature enough at the time to properly appreciate it.

Michael Biehn as Mickey in THE DIVIDE

In the years since those turbulent times, the nuclear threat has lessened if not gone away entirely, replaced by environmental, political, cosmic, technological and societal threats. But I think my generation might never get that image of the mushroom cloud out of our heads, or forget what it represents. But I still enjoy watching post-apocalyptic films, both the entertaining ones and the ones that had messages.

I didn’t enjoy watching Xavier Gens’ THE DIVIDE.

The gathering survivors

It opens powerfully, with panicked New Yorkers looking out their windows in abject horror at the sight of multiple nuclear explosions ripping their city apart; this is a scene that wastes no time, and convincingly paints a picture of immediate panic and imminent perdition. Immersed in utter chaos, the residents of one tenement building scramble down the stairs as their home crumbles around them, several residents making their way into their building’s fallout shelter. Their superintendent, survivalist-driven Mickey (Michael Biehn, ALIENS, TERMINATOR) reluctantly allows them in before sealing the door shut to the outside world. He’s been ready for this all along, but with the unwanted additions to his shelter, he makes an effort to ensure they know he’s boss and to stay out of his private room.

Lauren German (Eva) in THE DIVIDE

Eva (Lauren German, DARK COUNTRY) and her passive partner Sam (Ivan Gonzalez) make an effort to make the best of things, as does Marilyn (Rosanna Arquette, TRUE ROMANCE) and her young daughter Wendi (Abbey Thickson). But Mickey’s attitude grates on Designated Assholes Bobby (Michael Eklund, HUNT TO KILL), Josh (Milo Ventimiglia, who played Peter Petrelli in TV’s HEROES) and Delvin (Courtney B Vance, LAW AND ORDER: CRIMINAL INTENT). Life in the shelter is hard, activities are few and far between, food is rationed, and the toilet is a simple hole over a reeking septic tank. Mickey proves to be irritating, even aggressive at times, though his preparedness makes him right in most of the arguments, such as when he prevents Josh and Bobby from breaking the seal around the door and letting in the contaminated air.

This is how the world ends …

The door seal gets broken anyway – from without. A squad of armed men in white hazmat suits invade the shelter, none of them identifying themselves. In the struggle with the survivors, some of them get killed, but they still succeed in abducting Wendi. Josh volunteers to go out in one of the dead soldier’s hazmat suits to find out what is happening, and in his infiltration, he discovers a network of isolation tunnels and labs set up in the streets, where Wendi and other children, presumably taken from other survival places, are being experimented upon. Josh is discovered, and is exposed to the contaminated air before escaping back to the shelter, where the soldiers weld the door shut and trap them inside.

Knock knock …

More time passes, and tempers and sanity fray among the survivors. Eva’s relationship with Sam fractures, Josh begins to suffer the effects of exposure to the outside air. Marilyn told that her daughter is dead, escapes into insanity and an abusive relationship with Bobby, who’s out to become the next Alpha Male of the group. And his chance comes when Delvin discovers Mickey has been keeping supplies to himself, is killed in the consequent fight, and Bobby and Josh take over, torturing Mickey and threatening to plummet them all into chaos…

Firstly, the positives. The acting is commendable all around, particularly from Lauren German as the everywoman Eva, trying to maintain a sense of civility and decorum as all around her physically as well as metaphorically crumbles and rots, and Michael Biehn as the paranoid, emotionally damaged Mickey, able to be both sympathetic and unsympathetic at once. Xavier Gens takes the cramped, claustrophobic settings he created in FRONTIER(S) and exploits them to the fullest here (as well as working very successfully on a limited budget). The sets looks very realistic, and you can almost feel the grime and smell the decay as the characters spend more and more time down there (the movie was shot in chronological order, and a nutritionist was hired to put the actors on a strict diet to simulate starvation). And those few external shots looked incredibly real.

This is going to get messy!!

But there were a number of negatives about this film which for me overwhelmed the positives. The whole subplot about the hazmat soldiers taking the children comes and goes without explanation or exposition. Who were they? What were they doing? Were they the government, the UN, terrorists? Why take the children and not the adults? The level of organisation they displayed following a disaster of this apparent magnitude made me expect a twist at the end where it was all some insane social experiment being carried out. But no, their inclusion seems to be there to give the characters some more weapons, a hazmat suit, some bodies to cut up and dump down the septic tank, and to remove the child from the picture. Which, given the subsequent events, is a small blessing.

Which leads me into an even bigger problem with THE DIVIDE for me. Gens presents us with some startling images that are almost poetic – but then seems content to let the film slide into a wallowing exercise of nihilistic cruelty. We witness physical and emotional abuse, rape, torture (though somehow we’re spared witnessing the numerous bodies actually being dismembered with an axe), and while I’ve seen more far more visually explicit images in other films, the tone of THE DIVIDE made what we saw feel so much worse. It was exploitative, but unlike other movies, there was no relief about what is seen here, no hope. There is a pervading sense of despair throughout, and as the characters succumb to their darkest sides, I wondered why they even bother remaining alive. No one talks of rebuilding society, or finding family, or of helping each other. They appear little better than talking animals, and if I were there, I would not want to survive.

We seriously are not gonna get an explanation for this!!

And therein lies my biggest gripe with the movie: its message. Throughout the ordeal, the characters descend into madness, brutality, degradation, and writers Karl Mueller and Eron Sheean have taken a few pages out of LORD OF THE FLIES to present us with the notion that stripped of societal constraints, people will descend into savagery. Not even Eva, the character most likely to be the film’s conscience or moral compass, is immune (I won’t detail any more, for fear of spoilers, but I was both appalled and disappointed by her ultimate actions). The writers treat this as a Major Truth.

It’s not.

It’s all too easy to adopt a cynical attitude about humanity, to think that a selfish, murderous beast lies just beneath our civilised skins and clothes, and all we need is the opportunity. Sure, there will always be opportunists, and people who will crack under pressure. But for every story you hear or read about looters following a disaster, there are also stories of people offering aid, shelter, rescue to folk they don’t even know (of course, the negative stories will always get the headlines). For every war profiteer, there are more willing to lay down their lives for another, with no thought of reward.

Maybe I’m taking this far too seriously. Maybe it’s just the timing; my daughter is seventeen, about to become an adult and enter a wider world. There’s room in this world for a movie with a grim, nihilistic message, I suppose – but I couldn’t see myself watching this again, or recommending it to anyone else. I was much more pessimistic when I was younger, but now I believe that people have more sense of community and compassion than a movie like this would have us believe, and that this capacity is as ingrained and as a strong as our capacity for survival. They are better than you might think from watching this.

THE DIVIDE is out on DVD. Check out the trailer here.

Deggsy’s Summary:

Director: Xavier Gens

Plot: 2.5 out of 5 stars

Gore: 5 out of 10 skulls

Zombie Mayhem: 0 out of 5 brains

Reviewed by Derek “Deggsy” O’Brien