User Reviews

I hate movies who don't bother to spend $500 on a technical adviser. It totally spoils movies for me.

They show a "goof" where the toilet/latrine moves miraculously into the store room but miss out on so many others:

1) All the lights running on batteries would last a couple of hours at best 2) where does their air come from? all those people exhaling, smoking etc the air would be so polluted they'd suffocate in no time 3) Throwing a flare down into the septic system would cause a massive explosion due to the ignition of methane gas that builds up. 4) Why would the Chinese nuke NYC then immediately travel there to look for survivors? 5) If the building DID collapse (which it would after a nuclear explosion) it would take weeks of excavation with heavy equipment for anyone to reach them yet when the one guy leaves, it's totally clear 6) NYC is on the opposite side of the world from China. If they wanted american children, they'd go to LA or the west coast first, it's so much closer. 7) There is a scene where Mickey is trying to start a generator. At least they have a hose running from the exhaust outside somewhere, but running an ICE would consume all their oxygen in an hour. 8) why is everyone sleeping on chairs etc when they specifically say Mickey has so many mattresses?

I do hate it when they throw out common sense for the sake of a good story.

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. Classic "Schrodinger cat" dilemma whether to stay locked inside or explore outside and risk possible radioactive contamination unfolds.

Right from the beginning viewers are struck with unrealistic stupidity of characters. Only Michael Biehn's "Mickey" demonstrates slight signs of common sense. The rest are idiotic beyond any imagination. The movie quickly becomes a "why don't you just" and "how is this possible" brain torture, which insults viewer's intelligence in the most rude way. But it is still interesting to some extent because there is something going on outside that locked door. At some point the plot gets twisted into a potentially Sci-Fi area. But then because of the sheer indescribable idiocy of the characters the plot suddenly ends (right about 40 minutes into the movie).

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. I forward jumped through that one hour and 20 minutes only stopping at BDSM sex scenes, which turned out to be not that great either.

The movie looks completely staged. Food and water drag out into infinity as days or possibly weeks pass by. 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. We have people WATCHING nuclear blasts without eye protection and not suffering any ill effects (even TEMPORARY blindness) before running down a bunch of stairs in an effort to try and get to safety.

2. You have a guy who has obviously spent years and tons of money on preparing a shelter in case of some catastrophe BUT he never bothered to develop a plan about what to do in case...a bunch of people show up and he is going to take them in?

3. The people get into this shelter and IMMEDIATELY begin doing some incredibly stupid things. Perhaps it would have made more sense to try and figure out what they just witnessed or even feel a sense of loss or destruction instead of trying to pick fights with the guy who let them IN?

4. This plot hole truly baffles me. Supposedly one of the people inside the shelter has the capability to transmit their location with a walkie-talkie to the outside world. Err...excuse me, but ever hear of a thing called EMP? It wipes out all electronics so, even if that short-range radio suddenly developed long-range capability, it would be fried.

5. Then for no particular reason we throw in some government or military types that are not coming in to save them but are there to steal their children? WHAT? REALLY? Oh, and as a small addendum, the main guy who owns the shelter has no weapons with which to protect himself and the others...well, that's not quite true, he does have a gun which he conveniently remembers that he has AFTER he loses a finger and that gun becomes a CONVENIENT device for the movie to progress.

This particular movie resembles an acting class doing an IMPROV scene of exactly this type of scenario. Everybody is trying to show their best WILD and CRAZY characters to try and impress the teacher but they don't blend anything together to make a coherent story.

I watched the whole thing hoping it would get better and even at the very end I half-expected to see something that might make it all GEL together but even there, it just LOST it and left me saying....WHY did I waste my time watching this?

K, here's how I sum this movie up:

First, somebody had a really messed up childhood. Then, they grew up and made movies. Four seconds into this one, New York City is blown up by nuclear bombs. But that's not the worst thing that happens... After a handful of high rise apartment tenants are unlucky (yes, unlucky)enough to make it into the basement fallout shelter (provisioned by their super), we get one man's solution to the mystery of just what lurks in the dirty, icky, dark parts of the human psyche.

Nobody smiles or laughs or enjoys themselves in this film, and you won't either. As they sit huddled in the dirty, infested basement, they realize that their supply of tolerance and distraction is as short as their food supply. About a third of the way through the film, hopelessness and despondency give way to brutality, and that quickly degrades to outright depravity. If you've ever wondered to what lengths humanity is willing to stoop when confronted with total despair, it seems that Xavier Gens has a few thoughts.

This film is relentlessly (though strangely, not gratuitously) graphic. You have torture, rape, and death both concurrently and consecutively. Bodies of the dead are dismembered with axes and sent through the septic system. People are beaten on screen with unparalleled brutality. Blood and dust and grime is everywhere. But again, that's not the worst of it... The psychological torture that is meticulously detailed as the characters slowly lose their sense of morality, humanity, and eventually sanity makes films like "Hostile" and "Touristas" look tame. The quiet tension that pervades the basement is the most terrifying part.

So be warned. This is not a post apocalypse narrative in the spirit of "The Walking Dead" or "I am Legend". This is film a that will shock even the most hardened and desensitized horror fans out there. It will get inside your head, and affect the way you see people at least for a few days afterwords. But if that's what you're into, you'll find few films more memorable (somehow the word "enjoyable" just doesn't apply here). If you're not sure, have any degree of squeamishness, or thought that "Bridesmaids" was a good film, don't bother.

It's hard to say whether "The Divide" is "Good" or "Bad". (To jump off- point a bit and onto my soapbox, sites like IMDb tend to annoy me because I think that many of those who post don't understand the concept of aesthetic review. Just because you don't like it, or you weren't looking for a film that's going to disturb your sensibilities doesn't make it a bad film. A bad film is a film that fails to do what it intended to do -- a comedy that's not funny, a boring action film, a laughable horror film.) So, with that in mind, it's certainly not "garbage". In fact, it's obviously extremely effective. It's well acted, though I pity the actors having to go through the process of making it. It's well shot, edited, and scored, so technically, it's a well-crafted film. It has a statement, and I don't think there's any way to be unclear about it, but I'm not entirely sure that it's particularly profound or clever, and it's certainly not subtle. The question I have is whether this statement really needs to be made at all. I wouldn't be surprised to find that he won some bet with a friend over whether he could make the most emotionally abusive film of all time.

The one thing I will say is that in this day and age, which (for some sociological reason I'm sure grad students at schools all over the country are currently writing their theses on)the younger generation tends fixate on overly romanticized apocalypse narratives, it's oddly refreshing to see one that shows it as something other than an end to boring responsibility and an opportunity to blow stuff up with automatic weapons. Maybe it won't be all choppers, ad-hoc armored cars and AR-15s after all, but if it happens during my lifetime, I hope it doesn't suck this bad...

This movie is beyond horrible. The beginning is interesting and it feels like it's gonna be a good movie for a minute, but then some of the characters start talking. A Nuclear apocalypse has hit and right off the bat, 2 guys are complaining about the food. They complain about the beans, while they are lucky to even be alive.. Then everyone starts complaining about everything, and attacking the guy that saved their lives and let them in the bunker. Also a scene happens where somehow, a government team has secured the outside of the door to the bunker (Even after a building collapsed on it) with a tunnel, and a lab, and they cut the door off and take a child.. It makes no sense at all.. It's literally the dumbest movie I have ever seen in my life. The worst of the worst.

The Divide begins at the instant a nuclear missile hits a city. Some occupants of a building run into a basement and hide from the carnage. From this point on these survivors begin their descent into a hell of their own making as madness and primal aggression take hold.

This is a pretty unpleasant film to tell you the truth. The levels of degradation that the people in the bunker resort to is fairly grim. Physical, verbal and sexual violence all manifest themselves as these survivors lose touch with their humanity. They are not a particularly nice bunch of people to begin with, so this does pose some problems for us as an audience empathizing with any of them. Nevertheless, the film does generate quite a bit of suspense and there are some very unpleasant moments of nastiness. So it does work in a brutal in-your-face kind of way. And this is the movie's chief selling point.

While the setting is almost exclusively limited to the bunker, there is one unusual moment where one of the survivors is able to exit the confines of the building and come briefly into contact with the enemy. It's a very bizarre sequence where the mysterious bad guys appear to be storing children – one of which they earlier snatched from the bunker - in incubators. The children look either dead or blinded. It's horrific and utterly strange. Immediately after this the mysterious enemy weld our heroes back into their bunker and are never seen again. After this point the microcosm of the bunker just goes from bad to worse, as some inhabitants go mad and others sadistically insane.

Acting is OK. Michael Biehn overacts big time and fairly chews up the scenery throughout. Rosanna Arquette has an extremely unpleasant role. The other actors vary from being unpleasant psychopaths to negligible people. But the pacing is good and the limited setting doesn't affect things too much as the film keeps ramping the tension up. Overall, The Divide is a nasty movie with a very pessimistic view of how life in these extreme conditions will play out. If you like apocalyptic films on the more grimy and violent side of the spectrum then this is one to see.

This film is terrible. It is generic and even when it starts to go downhill quickly there is enough faith in some of the actors and production values to keep watching. Don't bother. A 15 year old who plays video games could have written the script. It has all been done before and much better (and shorter). People behave unrealistically and it is cliché after cliché. Even a mild mannered bookish lawyer should be able to shoot crazy rapist skinheads but no in the world of student level drama he can't. In short if you want to see this type of drama done well try The Hole. If you can read a book try Lord of the Flies. Don't waste your time with this.

The 1980s were scary times and I don't mean clothes and hairstyles . This was the era of MAD Mutually Assured Destruction where the East and West targeted each other with a nuclear stockpile where they were ready to be unleashed if the Cold War suddenly got very hot . We live in more peaceful times . There's more democracy in the world hence more peace and I don't miss the 1980s and watching something like THREADS still remains an unpleasant experience it is a nice little reminder of what could have been . With the end of the Cold War came the end of the nuclear holocaust genre so if you're making a film featuring mushroom clouds blooming all across the world you've got to bring something new to the table . 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 . It contains good cinematography as we see the trail of nuclear missiles reflected on the surface of her left eye . This is a problem with this mis en scene when the camera cuts to a long shot of her framed against the window and we see the devastation outside . That is it reveals the destruction has been going on for a considerable amount of time and yet the window remains intact and hasn't been affected by any sort of shock wave from a nuclear explosion . This sums up the problem of the film from the outset where things aren't given enough thought or thought through strongly enough to be credible and for a film that has a good idea constantly insists on wasting them

You can see the premise is all about how low human beings can go to survive and I was reminded of the British thriller THE HOLE from about ten years ago . THE DIVIDE tries to be a more post apocalyptic version of this type of story but contains some incredibly bad plot holes and too many ideas for its own good . The most startling thing is a subplot where the shelter is invaded by armed men wearing NBC suits who then capture a child survivor and try to eliminate the other people in the shelter . It hints that they're part of a foreign power who were behind the strike such as North Korea but after they seal up the shelter they're effectively forgotten about as though these scenes never happened . On the message boards there are several threads speculating who these white suited men are , a popular one being that a plague has broken out and America has nuked its own population to stop the plague spreading but at no point do any of the characters state there was anything out of the ordinary before the strike and no matter how you try to dress this up it's a major distraction from the plot . It might have worked better if this entire subplot had been deleted but it leads to a very contrived plot device where the sane survivor escapes via a NBC suit which begs the question as to why one of the bad guys hadn't thought of it ? More plot holes which sums up THE DIVIDE perfectly

In short it's a film with a 1980s Cold War premise made in the 21st Century . This is even reflected in the casting of Michael Biehn and Rosanna Arquette who were the two rising stars of Hollywood in the mid 1980s and whose careers quickly fizzled out . Despite a strong premise and a doom laden atmosphere THE DIVIDED quickly fizzles out too which is a shame because it did show signs of almost being a very good movie

Such a horrible horrible laughable film. I say laughable because some viewers seemed to have bought into this garbage as an exploration of the dark side of humanity. Nothing makes sense. To me, it's obvious this director has zero life experience dealing with people in life and death situations. Either that, or he wants us to believe that somehow this particular basement, ended up with weakest examples of humanity. At one point, there seemed to be some hope for the movie, as one of the basement dwellers explored outside the basement revealing a tubular network and laboratory put up by the attackers, but it all ended when he was forced back into the basement and the basement was welded shut by the attackers. Why this interesting plot line was not further explored is a mystery to me, perhaps they ran out of money and knew they couldn't afford the Sci-fi sets and CGI work needed, or more simply, the writer was not up to the task. The acting was okay, considering they weren't given much to work with. Consider, Mickey, the superintendent of the building, a man who lost his family in 911 and pretty much wanted to die to be with them again. Knowing that, the viewers are supposed to believe that he would hide a roomful of food from the rest of the survivors? Why? So he could live longer? The movie was filled with inconsistencies and with the expectations that the viewer should just buy into the action without question just so the director could make a scene about rape, murder and torture. Visually stun the audience enough, so they don't think about story logic seemed to be the strategy by the producers on this one. Unless you like gore for gore's sake, spare yourself.

John Paul Sartre hadn't seen The Divide when he declared that 'Hell is other people', but believe me, the film would do nothing to dispel his belief. 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).

Of course they immediately start bitching, bickering and ganging up on each other, but when armed, biohazard suited soldiers burst in to the bunker, snatch Wendy then, after a surreal, aborted sortie by Josh, weld the iron door shut, the trouble really starts. What follows is a powerful, disturbing, down right nasty depiction of the mental and physical deterioration of a band of desperate, disparate people suffering from cabin fever, radiation sickness and, eventually, full blown certifiable lunacy.

The performances in the film are of a calibre rarely seen in this kind of genre picture. In particular, Milo Ventimiglia (from Gilmore Girls!!) descent from regular guy to Lord of the Flies-style underground overlord is horrifically chilling, but even he is outshone by little known actor Michael Eklund's extraordinary turn as the psychotic, sexually depraved Bobby, whose sordid treatment of Marilyn is nasty in the extreme. (Poor Rosanna Arquette – what did she do to deserve this?)

The Divide is seriously not for the faint-hearted – with some scenes you'll really need your mental floss handy. 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 watched this the other day and while I enjoy post-apocalyptic survival films and games, this is one I wish I had passed on. The synopsis made it look so interesting, and for about the first half hour, it was. However, the situation turns from bad to unrealistic in a matter of moments, and we are left wondering exactly what the writers were smoking when they put together this mess of a film.

I'm not going to go in-depth into the story as many others have done this already, I will just post the questions that I had about the film.

1. Why isn't anyone concerned about the air supply? They smoke cigars and cigarettes without a care in the world.

2. What is the fuel source of that power generator?

3. Why doesn't anyone seem to want to find a way out? I know there is radiation outside, but after a few weeks (presumably they were in there for a long time, long enough for scurvy to set it although I'm still wondering how that happened on a diet of baked beans) in that hell hole even a rad-infested city would be preferable and they could seek treatment.

4. Why don't the scientists in the white suits check up on their comrades, or send in other soldiers, or... anything at all? They do nothing even though two of their number didn't report back in. They don't seal the door until one of the main characters goes exploring.

5. What's the lab for? Why are they so concerned with the eyes of those children, and why keep them alive after removing them?

6. Why doesn't anyone's health improve after they discover the new food supply that is complete with citrus sources? The scurvy would have gone away, though the radiation poisoning wouldn't. At the very least, the rate of degradation should have been considerably slowed. Instead, it almost seems as if at this point they start to get worse very quickly.

7. At the end, the Eva character locks herself in the food vault to don the suit. At least, that's what it looked like to me and my girlfriend. The two men were beating on the door to get in, and couldn't because the combination to the lock had been changed by the now dead gang leaders. She puts on the suit, and somehow manages to get out of there and into the bathroom, which was on the other side of the basement. How?

8. What happens to her after this? She can see that NY is leveled, but where does she go? What does she do?

9. Why is the Sam character such a worthless piece of garbage? I mean, I was literally screaming at him with the others at the end and I wasn't sorry to see him get the crap beaten out of him.

10. Why didn't Eva just let Mickey out? He was clearly the only one who could have brought the situation back under control and yet, she just leaves him tied to the chair. I wish he had been written with more of a leadership role.

11. We are never told exactly how the Marilyn character dies, though its presumably due to some sort of untreated vaginal infection brought on by repeated rapes and unsanitary conditions (Her unexplained bleeding, and the final rape\torture scene in which she was literally screaming in pain), but I would have still liked more closure than "she broke".

All in all, if you were hoping for a film that explores humans triumphing over impossible odds, or any kind of actual story at all... Move on. That's not this film. They never get out, they never find out why NY was attacked, they never do anything heroic or interesting, they just get sick, rape and beat each other, and then die. The end.

It just was not a good film, even by torture porn standards.