"To survive the end of the world you must first survive each other." Survivors of a nuclear attack are grouped together for days in the basement of their apartment building, where fear and dwindling supplies wear away at their dynamic.

REVIEW 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. 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.

Clocking in at over two hours, The Divide is a vicious horror film. It's premise is simple enough. Nine tenants of a New York apartment complex narrowly escape a deadly nuclear blast by finding their way into a bomb shelter built by their paranoid, ex-Marine superintendant. Whatever caused the total decimation of New York City is never explained, but the focus of the film isn't on the outside; it's on how the nine characters deal with living in an enclosed space with food quickly running out and madness slowly seeping in. As is typical with films like this, The Divide runs with the cliche idea that without rules and civilized order, people will eventually start killing each other for personal gain, the strong or most fearful will prevail and the weak will perish. Every character is as diverse as the next one, so there are plenty of different types of characters to identify with, most notably the heroine Eve (yes the Biblical reference is obvious), played by Lauren German. Not once does this girl make an immoral or selfish decision. And everyone else has a mix of good and evil attributes that will soon enough spark an all out war between them, leaving Eve with the realization that at least outside, she has a chance at surviving. Yes, you've seen this movie before. Lord of the Flies covered this ground quite well, as did The Beach and almost every zombie movie you've seen. But The Divide isn't as bad as you might think. I for one was never bored. I didn't predict where the story would go in terms of who would turn on who, or just how atrocious some of these people become. It's true that in times of crisis, you never know how people will react over time, and I was able to buy most of the plot twists and character developments. I also really liked Michael Biehn in this movie. His portrayal of Mickey is pretty much Cpl Hicks if he returned to Earth, couldn't adjust to ordinary mundane life, and became a paranoid, creepy old man. So The Divide is pretty familiar territory, but at least it gets the formula right. There's enough here to scare, disturb, and entertain.