The Divide movie review
I used to write movie reviews, normally I give them orally. This is mainly for my close online friends who enjoy the Heroes and actor Milo Ventimiglia. So, my Milo-centric (don’t judge me) review:
Consider this somewhat-to-totally SPOILERIFIC, read at your own risk. These are my personal thoughts on the movie.
I thought this movie was good, not great, not ‘fine’ or so-so, but it was well-thought out and good quality. It’s growing on me. I read a few reviews before hesitantly renting it and I’m glad I did. For anyone looking to watch it, just…read the summary and take that seriously. If Apocalyptic suspense horror thriller isn’t your thing then don’t watch and don’t whine. I had half a foot in the door based on the reviews (“Love it or hate it” and “over-the-top” they said amongst other things), thinking I would be disgusted and offended, but I wasn’t. Granted, I have a strong stomach for movies because, well, I know they’re fake and I’m probably de-sensitized.
For those of you who don’t know, the director, Xavier Gens, invited a lot of the actors (Michael Beihn and Milo Ventimiglia I know for sure) to write a lot of their own scenes, character and dialogue. I think that’s totally a cool thing to do if your actors are intelligent enough so I was interested to see this movie for that alone.
Everyone ranted about Michael Beihn’s performance…he’s really not even in the movie much. His character, Mickey, is…interesting, sure, but he’s not developed. If he was developed, it was so small it seemed manipulative and easy to overlook. You’ll want to know why he acts the way he does but the evidence to support it is kind of thread-bare, fill-in-the-blanks type thing. I didn’t like that. Perhaps I was merely examining him/his character too hard and missed what there was to see. I liked him at the end, though, so he must have developed somewhere.
Someone else praised Milo for his performance and…it’s well deserved, seriously. “Unpredictable and scary” and “Why would anyone try to make such a handsome man look ugly?” were among outside reviews. I always go into movies thinking “Okay, here’s the actor, I know its an actor…now blow me away with your character” and Milo did that with Josh. I like Milo, he doesn’t scare me, but he scared me as Josh in this movie. What makes that better is I didn’t even know he was scaring me, I didn’t clue-in or realize it until after the credits rolled.
He’s well-cast in this movie specifically because of his good looks (when he’s not suffering from radiation, starvation and dehydration) - you want to like him, believe him until he slides into the evil role without you noticing before he gets into the unpredictability. I like that his character acted like he’d used his looks to get what he wanted (read: sex) before. Josh admits up front, he doesn’t enjoy doing ‘bad guy’ things, but that they needed to be done. Milo wasn’t afraid to go a few places with the character, I will say. One thing about his performance is he’s not resting on his looks here, to say anymore is sadly spoilerific.
He lost weight for the role and I won’t lie, I want his old body back - its funny that him losing weight just makes him look more ripped, if less muscular and “curvy” if you will allow, less filled out. If he loses his ass, someone's going to die. The best part of his performance which really, truly blew me away was the way he held his eyelids at half-mast: given that these people are on half-rations, dehydrated, suffering from radiation and cabin-fever. He was the only actor to do this and he looks like he’s about to fall over dead at any minute which only adds to his crazy (not-sexy) appeal, some kind of zombie-ghost mixed up with a slasher (no puns intended) villain. He just doesn’t look well and that might set your teeth pleasantly/unpleasantly on edge.
About halfway through the movie, he has an emotional moment that sets his ‘baseline’ if you will. When he does snap, looking back at that moment will amaze you for the difference he’s undergone. I also spent and indecent amount of time giggling at the scene where Josh gets dressed up in some white space-suit - Milo’s a huge Star Wars fan and the similarities between the suit in The Divide and the storm trooper/clone suits in Star Wars…well. The scene wasn’t supposed to be funny, but those were my thoughts, “I bet he had a ball doing this scene, getting dressed up like a storm trooper……..ooh, look! He even has a little HUD!”
The almost instant ‘hatred’ between Mickey and Josh seems *really* out of proportion. They get down to the basement, they’ve barely met, Josh tries to leave (admittedly, and go where in a desecrated ground-zero with radioactive dust?) and he and Mickey nearly come to blows. Um…why not hold your temper and handle it like adults? I get that you’re freaking out and scared and going to die, but you’ve just met and there’s been no time to build this tension. Its….ridiculous and its unsupported. As things progress, the movie builds on this supposed ‘hatred’ beautifully, but how it starts….eh, I don’t see it.
Michael Eklund was a super-creep, wow. He’s the one you’ll think is unpredictable until you realize its just Josh who’s unstable. It takes a while until you realize Eklund’s Bobby is just an out-and-out creep who follows Josh around. His performance was out of the ball-park. He literally made me laugh in a highly tense, suspenseful, climactic scene whilst being a seriously damaged, psycho, desperate “bad guy.” That was amazing! I don’t think I’ve ever had that happen, wow. His crying scene was breathtaking. He will keep you wondering the entire movie and I personally love that. This guy has backstory you can see from miles away yet it’s never touched on. It will weird you out even more to know that Josh prefers Bobby’s company to his own half-brother, Adrian’s. Josh and Bobby’s bonding scenes are like some kind of Nazi-psycho-in-training bootcamp. Eklund should get an award of some kind - “Best Creeper 2011.”
I got serious kicks out of seeing post-Heroes Milo play the (presumably older) bad, get-stuff-done brother with a plan (for those who know Heroes, Milo played the younger, ‘nicer’ brother). You’ll be rooting for Adrian, the quiet, caring much-more normal brother by the end even though he’s barely in the film. We barely know him. He has quiet impact, I would say. We like him because...well, he's not Josh or Bobby! These half-brothers *do* actually get some background - scarily brief, but its there and its enough: I found I didn’t need the details even though I found out they were brothers rather late. Stupidly….Adrian’s name also came up remarkably late. I literally had to ask “Wait, who’s Adrian? Must be that guy because everyone else has a name.” That’s one thing the movie didn’t do well - how the group got to know each other.
Sam, the Frenchmen, doesn’t sound real French. His mild accent isn’t explained, whether he’s French-American or something else. I spent every moment of his screen time wondering if it truly was an accent or if he just had a weird vocal pattern or if he was horribly cast. That lack of explanation may be intentional as I don’t think the audience is meant to like him. I sure didn’t even though the actor, if cleaned up, would be quite sexy. Yay chest hair? He (and Marylin) are the perfect example of the type of person who couldn’t “couldn’t cut it” in a life-or-death struggle.
The character I assume is our main character, Eva (engaged, or so I assume, to Sam), is a Mila Jovovich look-and-sound-alike, which I found interesting and oddly entertaining. She’s pretty and she stays that way throughout which killed her believability. Everyone else is getting filthy and losing weight and hair and teeth, but not her. She’s pretty sexy throughout which *always* annoys me in a female character. She did lose her mascara, though, that helped make me feel better. Either she’s a serious kick-butt amazon with control over her emotions and reactions, able to think almost unnaturally clearly and level-headedly…or she’s played wrong. She’s more put together in a tight spot than the soldier character is - that’s just…Grr. I watched one scene and after escaping an otherwise jarring and near-dangerous event, her voice was very obviously fake-crying and failing at that. Her emotional calm and ability to think was…well, unbelievable. I get it; she’s the heroine, that’s great. But I barely grasped that she was our main character. I don’t feel bad for her, I just feel bad.
Marilyn….she’s the mother who undergoes a trauma to start with. She won’t strike you as very…’together’ shall we say. She’s a mother and as such I cut her slack as I know many women suffer from emotional problems after childbirth. She borders on the need to be medicated. The actress does a good job, she was believable; a lot of her acting was in the eyes which is where it needed to be.
Some of the ‘good’ characters, the more normal folk did try to protect her….but they sure didn’t try very hard. Sure, Marylin kinda chose her own path and stuck to it but she has moments where she tried to get away from her, uh, situation (understandably). She’s obviously not well in the head. There are a few scenes where Eva tries to help, Adrian gives some half-assed verbal attempts, Sam puts in even less effort, passive-aggressively trying to win points with whomever’s in charge at the moment. There’s a few scenes that should have been developed *more* because these characters clearly DON’T calm down well, at all, on their own. It just doesn’t happen. So why do they all just decide to “let things lie” on this issue? Which is a BIG issue, by the way, the whole women’s rights, rape, violence, maternal instinct, reproductive organs, all of that. Its incredibly abusive and disturbing yet it’s interesting that that part of society is still alive even at the end of the world. I will blame typical male assholes for this problem.
The one pseudo-romance in the film is understandable yet sickening which is the whole premise for the movie. It’s some great tension. Keep in mind that this is a wonderful “what-if” scenario. The movie is supposed to show us what fairly normal people would do if put in a death-is-inevitable, prison-like situation - they go crazy, they fight, they back-stab and murder, horde, bargain, lie and manipulate. Every bad tendency anyone has will come to light in this scenario, that’s just the way humans are so the capture of that was very well done. I personally enjoyed, for once, trying NOT to think “what would I do in that situation?” because its just so depressingly horrible you don’t want to consider ever having to deal with that. The movie was fast-paced enough that it kept up that feeling.
It’s humanity degrading itself in a cage of self-destructive death. (As a woman, I couldn’t help watching and thinking, whenever the male characters defaulted or resorted to violence, “Now, if there were more women then men in that basement, things would run a lot differently!”)
The cockroach cameo was so subtle, I almost missed it. Awesome! Cockroach, for the win!
Hair and makeup was wonderful. I couldn’t tell if someone’s forehead was an appliance or not and that bothered me - it made the skin look very weird and less mobile than I know it to be….I guess I’m supposed to think its an effect of radiation but that’s a stretch (get it? A stretch?) I like that as the movie went on, the characters took off their clothes (heh, I know) and here’s why: I figure that you’re in a basement with no airway except from the sewage so with a dozen or so people in there, breathing and fighting and yelling, there’s less oxygen which makes the temperature rise or seem like its rising. If that wasn’t the case…then the stripping was really dumb and scripted. The 'we're hungry and sick' makeup *almost* looks fake, but if you take the lighting into account, you won't notice horribly. Again, these puns.
The music, the score…wow! This repeated two-note phrase, slow piano, my gosh. It’s haunting and perfect! I think you can hear it in some of the previews, so go check it out, it’s gorgeous and it offsets what’s going on wonderfully. I drool over an amazing score. It also gives us a sense of the passage of time, which is freaking crucial because the movie sure doesn’t explain much of that. I didn’t like that lack of specification on the time/timeline.
One thing I found really bone-headed about this movie was the chopping up of rotting bodies. The toilet was basically a hole in a box that led down into the sewage, right? It’s made of wood, they have an axe. But instead of hacking up the wood (one and done) to make room for *the whole body*, they hack up the bodies for dramatic and rather pointless effect. Then they act throughout the movie like this is some horrible punishment or tragedy, a right of passage, a sign of manhood, etc. Sure bodies smell, but so does sewage, right? I didn’t totally connect the need to get rid of the bodies, either. So, um…you didn’t have to chop up the bodies. Keep this in mind because the ending is actually funny when you think of this.
I also didn’t like that the movie showed nothing of squabbling or near-violent fights over simple, small things. Very few people lost their temper over small things which, in a high-stress, eventually-deadly situation that is hopeless, people do stuff like that. The movie focuses *only* on the squabbles over sex, guns, food/water, torture and hacking up bodies. It will make you think those fights are all that goes on in their days of spare time because there’s no normality or ‘down time’ shown if you don’t count the countless eating scenes which is a good focal point as food is scarce/rationed. What really torqued me is that they get close to an “unimportant” squabble…and they don’t use it - the incident is with a hairbrush but it’s too early in the movie to use. The only normality is a game of Truth or Truth (a variant on Truth or Dare) and even that isn’t normal. I get that men don’t really like to get to know one another, but these people are bored out of their minds and the mind will want to be stimulated the same as the penis. There’s no dialogue or scenes of people just trying to stay sane.
The little girl’s hair braid was such a write-in, too.
Oh, and this movie won’t answer a lot of questions or give closure. I like not knowing sometimes because, to me, that’s part of being entertained. We know no more (usually) than the characters themselves. You'll see the ending coming a mile away, but so what?
Some warnings: language, brutal beatings complete with realistic sound effects (yum), guns, blood and some gore, outright but fairly brief torture, loss of fingers, sounds/implication of hacking up of bodies with a supposedly-blunt axe, a ‘random’, disturbing sex scene (the woman is supposedly consenting, but she’s mentally ill and sick and winds up screaming) involving two men, a semi-rape scene, explicit sexual dialogue that was sexually degrading to both men and women, cross-dressing/drag, some stalky behavior, cornering people, general sickness, manipulation/lying/bartering (sometimes using sex), it borders on near-infidelity if you consider an engaged couple to be married, addressing bodily functions and some disgusting uses for that, and from another review: “The interesting uses of duct tape.”
There’s no nudity. Thank goodness.
But know that these are all applied at the CORRECT moments in the film. Nothing will seem gratuitous if you keep in mind the scenario. There’s no ‘300’/Spartacus CG blood splatters for effect for example.
For those who like drama or horror or even character/humanity studies will like this movie. I don’t like hopelessness (which this movie basically was) or dirty, grungy aesthetics but I liked this movie because it does what it says it will do and makes you feel what you should feel for the setting. Sadly, I think this went straight to DVD, I rented it from iTunes (which is another story - it took me something like 10 hours to download it - I was PISSED), but I think I might buy it because the more I think about it, the more I like it.