Division 19

source: Division 19

DIVISION 19 begins with a man telling us we are idiots, evading our responsibilities daily while 'the world burns'. With climate changers on the streets of London, Gilet Jaunes in Paris and kids leaving school in Sweden to take up arms and legs and anything else they can super glue - these are interesting times. DIVISION 19 certainly falls into the sci-fi genre of fear. But this is not fear of The Other - but fear of ourselves. How inert we are in a world desperately in need of action - ours - to save it. Beginning with a look at prison TV Panopticon (a comment on far authorities will go to contain those who are not followers and possibly the jail also being a metaphor for the world we inhabit) and swinging wildly through a world of surveillance, target drones, crazed robots and the disenfranchised, Division 19 takes on a whole heap of subjects which could fill six hours at least. That said, all the perfermances are good (Draven especially good as the drugged hero of Panopticon TV Hardin Jones) and it looks absolutely great. But you have to concentrate. Halewood's message seems to be 'act now, or pay the price'. Maybe we get what we deserve.

I will only recommend this movie for good background noise. The dialogue is repetitive, bland, and short with no real point in what is being said. The characters are shallow. The beginning of the movie establishes a story the entire rest of the film does not follow in a very bad, poorly thought-out way. This film is an hour-and-a-half of a couple characters standing in different locations, and that's it.

Division 19 is a low-budget science fiction and a study of the politics of surveillance, data mining and state control gone very bad. While these themes may have been covered before, they are still prescient in a world of fake news, data manipulation and DNA swabs. Hardin Jones is a prisoner in a jail open to a public able to vote online on his life choices. For the prison industrial complex he is the golden goose. To the CEO of that complex, he is maybe something more. So when Jones (a sympathetically zoned out Jamie Draven) escapes, Neilsen (Alison Doody) wants him back. While on the outside Jones experiences a world he cannot survive due in part to his face appearing on every screen across the city. While inside, his baby brother Nash (Will Rothhaar) has joined a band of cyber-geeks who survive off grid in the sewers and rooftops of the unnamed and crumbled city. The youthful posse known as DIVISION 19 is blackmailing the government - led by Charles Lyndon (Linus Roache) - with threats to destabilize the power grid, banks and therefore the economy. Popular with the voters (who get to leave work early thanks to an early lights out) the cyber punks must either be stopped or listened to - a choice which flags the main theme of the film - if we continue to employ the same methods - we will forever find ourselves with the same outcome. While there may be a few too many elements - the plot in itself is somewhat convoluted - the themes are resonant and disturbing. While we, the citizens, may have the power to change the world - the obstacles before of are sometimes those of our own making. For Manning, Snowden and Assange, standing up to be counted was brave and led to their public demise. But as a collective (i.e. Anonymous) that could be a gamechanger. DIVISION 19 is not without its faults (the plethora of subjects being one) but it is well-written, acted with subtlety, looks way bigger than its meager budget and is a timely reminder that nothing will or can change, unless we have the will.

Entirely too many scenes of the actors just staring into the distance apparanty to fill the time lost from lack of content. Repetitive scenes of people just walking. The idea behind the movie was solid, but the direction was terribly lacking. Hopefully a more skilled director will take the idea and present us with a version that won't make me demand that the money I spent on the rental be returned. I gave the movie a three rating because there was obviously some effort involved. Don't judge a movie by it's trailer.

OMG DID YOU SEE THEM USING A 2010 MACBOOK IN 2039!!! Was poised to receive a great action / sci fi film but no.. every scene blends into the next without the previous one being explained. It's incredible slow. Incredibly irritating for the previous scene not to be explained. The people who cut the trailer together owe me money as was led to believe this was a fast paced slick futuristic flick.

This is a stylish, timely, dystopian film about where we may be heading. It's set in a future with the surveillance state watching over all, and "reality" television taken to the logical limit. How much time is left before that's our world?

IMDB isn't the only site plagued by fake reviews, but they need to get a handle on them. If I spend $30 for a sub-par phone charger then I get my phone charged intermittently, and maybe I return it. If I invest 2 hours in a movie that is incoherent, repetitive, and pointless, I just wasted 2 hours. No value whatsoever and I can't get my time back. This movie is horrible. 7.7 reviews when I queued to watch and now under 4. It deserves a 1-2 rating. This movie is the cinematic equivalent of melatonin.

Hardin Jones (Jamie Draven) is the star of Panopticon TV, a live online portal accessing the prison system that invites subscribers to vote on and sometimes control the 'choices' of felons. It's Big Brother gone mad. After 10 years of this brutal existence, Hardin is ill-equipped to survive on the outside, but that's where he finds himself after being sprung from jail by a posse of hooded cyber-bandits. Writer-director SA Halewood presents a dystopian world in which hospitals have been replaced by ATM-style medication dispensers, and robots - programmed by humans - have developed mental-health issues. Don't laugh; it could happen. There are no jobs; citizens sell organs online to survive. And with Hardin's face on every screen in the city via a 24-hour advertising loop, there is nowhere for him to hide. But all is not lost. Hardin's younger brother Nash (Will Rothhaar) has refused to embrace The System. He and his fellow roof-dwellers (the Gilet Jaunes of 2039) threaten to hack into banks, close down the power grid and interrupt satellites if their demands -an end to the curfew and mandatory tagging - are not met. While the creator of Panopticon TV Neilsen (Alison Doody) yearns for the return of her golden goose Hardin, President Lyndon (Linus Roache) has a more measured approach, listening to the demands of the Gilet Jaunes - not least because they appear to be winning over the electorate. It has to be said that Halewood's thesis, that modern technology enables the state to crush and commody the individual, is timely. In effect, Hardin represents most of us, the acquiescent, while his brother personifies individuality, dignity and freedom. DIVISION 19 is well-crafted, powerfully acted, and hums with contemporary resonance. It asks a lot of its audience, but then that's the film's point. What are we and where are we heading, if we don't think for ourselves?

I had a really hard time staying awake for this mess of a film. The first 1/4 of the film was decent enough to suck you in, but then it was just random dumb camera shots (literally, 5 second scenes jumping all over the place - to no where) and some decent (but useless) Parkour acrobatics. Clearly the concept was taken from many other films, but I didn't care about that. What bothered me was writer/director/producer Suzie Halewood's poor attempt to create a decent story/screenplay. It almost seems like of the 5 hours total of decent filming, it was edited down to random 5-10 second scenes that were repetitive and ended up no where. Major plot issues with lack of any real story, and even worse dialogue. How do two brothers meet again after 10 years, have a one-sided 5 second conversation about nothing, then onto the next scene? Jamie Draven as Harden needed much more dialogue, instead of all these irrelevant scenes on buildings. I get this was a low budget film, and I really enjoyed the low budget effects, but the problem here is the very amateurish writing and terrible screenplay with useless scenes, jumping in and out of nowhere. Halewood's directing behind the camera was not bad, but her editing the film to its final cut was atrocious. A 5th grader could've written a more solid story. Nevertheless, ignore the clearly fake 8-10/10 reviews. This film had a great opportunity that Halewood blew trying to wear all these hats. It's a 4/10 from me, strictly for the decent low budget effects and the acting.