The Divide
Tags: insanity

Plot synopsis:
As nuclear explosions ravage New York City, residents of an apartment block rush downstairs to escape from the building, only to be forced into the basement by further explosions. Only eight of the residents – Eva (Lauren German) and her boyfriend Sam (Iván González), Josh (Milo Ventimiglia) and his brother Adrien (Ashton Holmes), Josh's friend Bobby (Michael Eklund), Marilyn (Rosanna Arquette) and her daughter Wendi (Abbey Thickson), and Devlin (Courtney B. Vance) – manage to force their way into the building's bomb shelter before the superintendent, Mickey (Michael Biehn), seals the door. The group acclimatises to the cramped surroundings while Mickey asserts his dominance over the shelter and its denizens, much to the chagrin of Josh, Bobby, and Devlin. After some time, the shelter's door is broken open and the shelter is invaded by armed soldiers in biohazard suits; the men's speech is unintelligible and their allegiance remains ambiguous. The men attack the group and seize Wendi, leaving the shelter with her. Devlin and Mickey manage to kill three of the men and Mickey takes a rifle. Josh volunteers to use one of the dead soldier's suits to leave the shelter and search for Wendi.
Outside of the shelter, Josh finds the area entirely sealed off by plastic sheet tunnels connected to a laboratory. Josh's outfit allows him to explore the lab, where he discovers several unconscious children, including Wendi, in stasis units; their hair shaved off and their eyes bandaged. One of the soldiers checks the ID on Josh's suit and, realising he is an imposter, tears out his breathing apparatus, exposing Josh to the air. Josh flees back to the shelter, killing two of the soldiers on the way. After Josh returns, the soldiers weld the door shut from the outside, trapping everyone within. Time passes; Josh begins to suffer the effects of the radiation and admits to Adrien that he only went outside to find rescue for Adrien and himself. Eva, in a fractured relationship with the meek Sam, grows closer to Adrien. Bobby volunteers to hack up the bodies of the dead soldiers so their decaying remains can be thrown into the toilet's septic tank. Devlin grows suspicious that Mickey is hoarding resources. Marilyn, having been told by Josh that Wendi is dead, enters into a sexual relationship with Bobby.
Marilyn attempts to convince Eva to sleep with Josh, warning her that the men will want sex. The group grows increasingly angry with Mickey as resources grow scarce, culminating when Devlin discovers Mickey's locked safe room and threatens to taser him if he does not open it. A struggle ensues and Mickey shoots Devlin in the head with the rifle. The group do not believe Mickey's argument of self-defence, and an increasingly ill Josh, and an increasingly deranged Bobby, torture him to gain the code to the safe room. Eva throws the rifle down the toilet to stop Josh using it. Seizing authority, Josh and Bobby are physically and emotionally abusive of Marilyn. Josh makes it clear that he wants Eva, and Sam is unable to stand up for her. Eva and Sam try to protect Marilyn from Josh and Bobby, but are unable to. While Eva is tasked with watching Mickey, Mickey reveals that there is a gun hidden in his safe room.
Josh and Bobby force Eva to hack up Devlin's corpse when Sam cannot, leaving Eva distraught. Josh and Bobby, both losing their hair to radiation sickness, shave their heads. Mickey informs Eva that there is another way out of the shelter, through the septic tank to the sewer. Eva tries to retrieve the gun, but cannot get past the pair. She finds Marilyn's corpse, the two having beaten her to death. Eva notices her hair is falling out and realizes she is also sick; the shelter is not protecting them from the outside because of the broken door. Eva sends Sam to retrieve the gun while she cuts the power to distract Bobby and lures Josh away with the promise of sex. Josh grows suspicious and rapes Eva, but she fights him off with help from Adrien. Sam retrieves the gun, but as Bobby, Josh, Eva, and Adrien yell instructions at him, Sam shoots and kills Adrien. Josh brutally beats Sam. Bobby turns on Josh and is about to shoot him when Eva cuts his throat with a tin can lid. Eva frees Mickey, who shoots Josh. On his last action, Josh smashes an oil lamp, setting himself alight and causing a fire in the shelter. While Sam and Mickey attempt to put out the blaze, Eva chooses to escape. Eva recovers the biohazard suit and locks herself into the safe room, leaving Mickey and Sam trapped inside the burning shelter.
Breaking through the toilet into the septic tank below, Eva drops into the tank and finds a ladder to the street. She emerges into the remains of the city and stares blankly at the total devastation.

Review: We don't like to think that people are capable of certain things, but in extreme conditions people can be pushed to do the unimaginable.This is the the important point of the film, rather than the storyline, or "how the world ends".
One person even called it torture porn (Im not sure how many movies this reviewer has seen but I reckon he certainly doesn't know what the torture porn genre looks like).
I saw some reviews about this movie and all were that it was "sooo bad", "waste of time" and "terrible movie" and at the same time people told me it was an "shocking post-apocalyptic masterpiece" First i didn't want to watch it because of the ratings.Ill never trust the ratings again !This is the most criminally underrated, hated, boycotted movie EVER !
What you don't know is that, after quite an interesting start, things simply go to hell in every possible way - the plot is thrown out the window, the characters start behaving completely stupid 5 minutes into the movie, and the are really no explanations for anything that goes on from that point.The acting is actually not bad - it's simply that the characters these actors put life into make no sense.
I have no problem with gore, violence, exploring the dark side of human nature, sci-fi etc.So, that's why I am going to recommend to skip this awful pretentious piece of trash and watch a much, much, MUCH better Spanish post apocalyptic movie, called The cold hour - a film that has all the same elements and then some, ends up just as bleak, but actually works!.
I wasn't a fan of Gens' previous works, Hit-man was generally disappointing but that was to be expected of any video game-based movie, but THE DIVIDE goes to show that Gens may not be a lost cause after all when it comes to filmmaking.
Fantastic job by the cast ensemble, you've got Eva (Lauren German) who tries to remain sane and level-headed through the ordeal, and there's Marilyn (Rosanna Arquette) who suffers mental problem after the failure to protect her daughter, and then there's Delvin (Courtney B Vance) who at first may seem to be the reasonable one of the bunch, and you also have the cocky sh*theads Bobby and Josh, played by Michael Eklund and Milo Ventimiglia respectively, the shelter itself is owned by an ex-firefighter Mickey (Michael Biehn) who'd rather not share if he had the choice.
Right from the start of the beautifully done CG nuclear explosion, you know that it's not going to end well, because there is no way that these characters could stand each other, not with the limited resources they have and the frustration that comes from being self-imprisoned.
However, as the horror story unfolded (not exactly horror genre film, save for a few scenes, but horrific in the psychological debacle of its characters), the crowd got quiet and silently absorbed the very well-crafted human drama.
You know the kind of thing: there's no or little food, a couple of the guys start to go knutz blah, blah, et cetera, et cetera.Quite why people get the notion into their head that another, look at the monkeys degenerate into barbarism as they struggle to survive isolated from civilization, plot is a scintillating prospect for an original script is baffling in the extreme but there you go, it happens and with depressing regularity.
I try to always look for the good things in movies but after wasting 2 hours of my life i simply had to warn others to please pick another movie.i am a sci-fi fan and i have read a lot of post apocalypse stories but the sheer amount of scientific errors, goofs and illogical plot twists makes this one of the worst i've seen in my 35 years and trust me i've seen a lot.The casting director did a great job and the excellent actors did their best to stay professional.
Story arcs that stop halfway or go totally different ways without a single reason.Granted i am not a big fan of art movies but this movie is so shallow there aren't even multiple levels you could try to work through.This ain't art,not even close.At the very best you could call this a torture fantasy like Saw but without a plot whatsoever.The people involved in this will not be putting this on their resume, thats for sure.
I just hated this movie so much, not because it touches profound themes or because of it's exploration of the human psyche (which there is none, apart from the twisted sick mind of the director), I simply hated because it started out great and slowly degraded to utter crap, violence fest, torture, rape, masochistic sex and all kinds of human deviations not worth watching.
Any decent people still living out there that want to sit back and enjoy a nice SCIFI after work should STAY AWAY from this utter garbage, go rent a nice movie with a message but not this.I have to endure this piece of junk for 1 hour after I decided to stop it, my wife couldn't watch it anymore.
(I don't think what I'm writing here is a spoiler; everyone knows the premise of the movie, and Bobby is recognized almost immediately as an erratic personality.)This movie reminded me just a little of the superb BBC docudrama, "Threads" (1984), which was an equally brutal look at the aftermath of a nuclear war – far more so than the inferior American "The Day After," which made headlines a year earlier.
It is well made, but well made does not make a good movie.Reviews of this movie stating it is 'torture porn' are a little exaggerated, I've seen worse, but this film does seem to like wallowing in the worst possible facets of humanity, simply for the enjoyment of it.
I do not think the characters are realistic in the sense that not all humans are inherently bad/stupid, as this film suggests, though maybe this might be true about Americans ?
A far more powerful message could have been put over, in a far more simple environment.Characters are extremely well casted, each actor chosen presumably for their acting skills as opposed to the "teeth and chiseled jaw" look, and this shows through in the development from normal everyday people, to insane disease ridden madmen that we see near the end.
Biehn excels in this movie, however both Milo Ventimiglia and Lauren German are outstanding, the former surprising me somewhat as his Heroes character never really gelled for me.This is an excellent portrayal of the degradation of human society, ignoring the unnecessary backdrop, is very likely to be how we would revert back to our more base instincts in the face of severe hardship and confinement.A modern day Lord of the Flies - unmissable.8/10.
When you're making your list of the worst films ever made, save a spot for this monstrosity.This isn't 'MST3K' "bad" where at least you can make fun of it our play a drinking game around it, this is just plain torture.Why does this movie get 5.8 stars?
Questions like "Who bombed USA?" and "why would that person do that?" are the most simple questions in this film, but still takes a lot of thinking to make out.The characters is very realistic, and due to the way Xavier Gens has directed the movie, the characters goes through a BIG transformation.
I would have liked to see more character development prior to the basement, but the progression through the movie does a decent job.I read "torture porn" and was expecting MUCH worse.
A truly disappointing piece of film that had the potential to be a very interesting exploration of human nature in captivity.Starts off well with a good set up but then spirals into scene after scene of unnecessary violence and no plot leaving the viewer feeling sick more than anything else.
Good music is gone since the 90's, now movies are going the same way.To say that me, with no experience in film making or directing, could have come with a much better movie is the purest true.My advice to anyone with at least half a brain, skip this nonsense and watch something really well made, such as 'Perfect sense', a fantastic movie, at least 1000 times better..
Rosanna Arquette just does what she does best, effortlessly playing a psychotic sl*t.This movie was a challenge to sit through, and I only persisted because of my love for the genre and hope that it would get better.Extremely disturbing does not a bad movie make, but when combined with an incoherent script and reliance on shocking human depravity this movie just fails on nearly all levels.I won't say a complete waste of time, but given a complete script re-write, what could have been...If you sate for a great movie in this genre, give this a miss and watch Gattaca instead..
Normally, I don't do reviews for a movie but due to the VERY AWFUL nature of this film, let this be a warning to other viewers of this title.I watched this film due as I thought this is a post-apocalyptic survival kind one.
That and the power of denial.Like in Hannanh Arendt sociological and political philosophy, this is not an easy black and white bad and evil piece of crap made in Hollywood, nor the spectator is in his sofa's comfort watching different twilight zone wolds assuming they have fictional characters with totally alien behaviors from his own human moral and ethical patterns.
The scene exists solely to get a gun and a hazmat suit into the basement bomb shelter which could have been done in other ways.The bottom line is this is an effective horror movie but a relatively bad science fiction movie that accounts for the division in fan reviews.
One of the plot hole will make you think if the director were smoking crack - because it doesn't add up with the previously established spatial sequence (when they walk into the basement it was stairs and walls; but when one of the guy walk out it is not).The ending was also god awful, it makes the whole movie pointless.
Both in terms of human beings and cinema.In your stock standard, straight off the shelf post-apocalyptic environment a small group of survivors huddle in the basement of their apartment building alongside Micky (Michael Beihn), the building superintendent who seems to well prepared for just this possibility.Before the shellshocked masses have any real opportunity to swap insurance information a group of white suited men with big guns breaks through the metal door, kills a few, takes some others and leaves, this time sealing the remaining few from the outside.
But as some of the darker predictions of Aldous Huxley, George Orwell and Ray Bradbury begin to morph into reality, and as the world's "haves" and "have nots" glare in mutual hatred across the growing chasm of economic disparity, one can almost hear a low, feral growl of discontent and barely suppressed rage on the street: human beings, we all too frequently forget, are but one more among the animal species, and predators at that.The Divide, by French ultraviolence auteur Xavier Gens (Frontiers, The Horde, Hit-man, etc.) drives that point home with shocking force.As nuclear destruction rains down upon Manhattan, a disparate group of typical apartment dwellers are forced to shelter in the basement for agonizing weeks, watching their supplies and hopes dwindle.The building's superintendent is crusty survivalist Mickey - portrayed convincingly by Michael Biehn, best known as John Connor from the Terminator.
Perhaps this is why the movie maintains interest - there's an ambiguity that is compelling - none of the characters are snowy white nor purely evil.Throughout the story, Lauren German's wickedly lovely eyes convey a fetching, stunned naivete as her main character Eva (perhaps a derivative of "Eve" - inheritor of a new world?) witnesses the increasingly Hellish events unfold.Milo Ventimiglia (Peter Petrelli in Heroes) and Michael Eklund (narcotics detective Rene Dejardins in CBC's Intelligence) are chillingly convincing as a pair of goons who grow increasingly brutal and amoral as their sanity erodes from fear and radiation sickness.
While it doesn't break any new ground, it certainly delivers on its promise, with memorably shocking and chilling moments viewers aren't likely to forget.Were it not for the aforementioned plot hole, this film would earn higher marks, but as it stands, I still rate it at an eight out of ten, and would definitely recommend it to friends for a "scary movie night".The Divide (Thriller, 2011, 110 min.) Directed by Xavier Gens; written by Karl Mueller, Eron Sheean; starring Lauren German, Michael Biehn, Milo Ventimiglia, Courtney B.
"The Divide" is a horror post-apocalyptic science fiction movie, about what happens to a group of 8 survivors after a nuclear attack on New York, when they procure shelter in the basement of the building that they live.The mood among the survivors will degrade slowly and the inability to get help, plus the lack of basic resources and the basic psychological problems of each person, will be accentuated.From the standpoint of filming, it presents a claustrophobic atmosphere, very detailed and it conveys what is happening: images of violence, as one might expect are gradually more frequent, as the rape ones.The performances are very good, and can see the characteristics of each individual and their evolution in this environment.
I'm sure of that, just look at the news.The only thing that is still in the air, and I wanted to have further information, is who are the military and their objectives in the film, because even in the end, it is still unanswered.In short: this triller is a great post-apocalyptic horror, but not for the weak.
Then go watch this Utter Piece of Incredible Crap..It is easy to understand what the world is coming to and why, if so many people actually like this movie!!!!
It begins predictably enough: as a nuclear explosion ravages New York, the residents of an apartment block take refuge in the bunker-like basement, which also happens to be the home of survivalist janitor Mickey (Michael Biehn).From the start, the combination of characters is not a happy one: quiet, determined Eva and her weak husband Sam (Lauren German and Iván González), shell-shocked mother Marilyn (Rosanna Arquette) and her young daughter Mary, short-tempered Delvin (Courtney B Vance), arrogant bully boys Bobby (Michael Eklund) and Josh (Milo Ventimiglia) and Josh's sensitive brother Adrien (Ashton Holmes).
But it's a stunning achievement for director Xavier Gens (whose last output was the creaky action flick Hit-man, which even Timothy Olyphant couldn't save) and a must for any self-respecting horror fan.Just don't expect to come out of this bleak drama smiling: as the nuclear ash falls silently across a desolate New York City, we are left with the feeling that, to misquote Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds, there is nothing worth fighting for in the spirit of man..
I think that's part of what the movie is trying to convey -- that getting stuck in a bunker during a post-apocalyptic scenario can potentially cause a Divide-esque situation.
The movie starts off with a cliché twist, which all fans of post-apocalyptic genre love: nukes fall, people take shelter in a basement trying to survive.
Viewer gets thrown back into the beginning of the movie to watch an hour and 20 minutes of poorly acted literally retarded characters doing stuff that majority of people would call sick.
Humans appear to survive without air ventilation in a sealed basement while working out, having sex and beating life out of each other.If I was to describe all of the directing blunders, I would need a dozen of pages.Unless you are a huge fan of post-apocalyptic movies and MUST watch every single one, or if you cherish cheap BDSM, this one is not worth watching..
This movie felt like it was rushing although it was a long, drawn out affair.Now, I've read enough novels and seen enough movies to understand the premise that when society breaks down so go all the checks and balances that keep us from picking up a stick and smacking someone over the head with it because we don't like his eye colour BUT...I would like to believe that it would take longer than 5 seconds BEFORE we get to that point.********Here there be Spoilers********* The ONLY actor that seemed to possess a modicum of sense was Michael Biehn and I'm not sure if he adjusted the script as they shot it or the writer and director had a long series of meetings to work on his part.But even there, there were plot holes.1.
This film THE DIVIDE does try but fails quite badly It gets off to a good start as a young woman watches the nuclear destruction of New York take place .
I have read some people think humans would not behave like the people in this film, and I am not going to argue that point, as I do know better!
There is a (presumably) nuclear attack at which point the occupants of the building find themselves trapped in the basement.After being trapped for a while, one by one they turn nasty and violent and begin to rape and kill each other for no reason whatsoever.That is literally all you need to know about this movie - there are no great psychological insights, no comment on human nature and it is certainly no great character study.Even if you believe that humans are inherently evil and this is the kind of thing that would happen, the bad script, storyline and AWFUL characterization in this movie make it impossible to like.No redeeming features..
The metatheatre I alluded to at the start of my review is played out by segregating peoples reactions in almost the same way the characters of the film are divided into their positions.
If you are one of those people who have to know why something happened or try and make sense of the madness, you may not like this movie.