UK / USA 2017 93m Directed by: S.A. Halewood. Starring: Alison Doody, Linus Roache, Lotte Verbeek, Clarke Peters, Toby Hemingway, Daniel Newman, L. Scott Caldwell, Will Rothhaar, Ashton Moio, Jamie Draven, Tim Jo, Anthony Okungbowa, Jonathan Stanley. Music by: Sebastian Fayle, David O'Dowda.
2039. Jails have been turned into online portals where the public gets to choose what prisoners eat, wear, watch and who they fight. So successful is Panopticon TV, it is about to be rolled out to a whole town, providing subscribers even more choice.
|
Division 19 presents a grim forecast of the logical outcome of capitalism: a world of conformity and commerce within a united totalitarian state. In this world technology is controlled by key individuals and organisations, all US-based, who use their power to manipulate and control. As such the film shares the premise of Huxley's Brave New World - that capitalism is taking us down the road to uniformity and the loss of individual liberty. Filmed (appropriately) in bankrupt Detroit; Division 19 lays bare the misery of a community in decline: urban decay, unemployment, poverty and violent crime. The downtown streets are eerily empty, the shops desolate, homes abandoned and dilapidated; what little community there is exists on the outskirts of the city.
The central character, Hardin Jones, is a particularly valuable commodity to the state. Every aspect of his dismal life inside a high security prison is screened 247 on Panopticon TV - an interactive television and marketing channel. Whatever Hardin 'chooses' goes viral, from sunglasses to designer jeans. However, while inside the prison there is no freedom of movement, outside the prison there is little freedom of thought; within the commercial zone citizens are subjected to a seemingly never-ending stream of mind-numbing marketing and interactive light entertainment. Big Brother is watching and trading hard. Into this nightmarish dystopia enter a group of fresh-faced parkour anarchists who hack into the machinery of the state and use this technology to challenge the corruption at the heart of it. Their demands are radical and utopian: essentially an end to investment banking and state control. Their second aim is to spring Hardin from prison, for amongst this group of computer geeks is Nash, Hardin's brother; the brother Hardin lost his liberty trying to save. There is no evidence of Nash on The National Register; no fingerprints, no iris-scan, no DNA, no address, no bank details, no loyalty cards, no credit, no voting history. While an unsuspecting Hardin is intimately known to everyone in the city via Panopticon TV, Nash has effectively disappeared. The struggles of both brothers to free themselves from the reach of a dehumanising state forms the central thrust of the story.
Division 19 is a great-looking film; the wide vistas of a bleak and barren landscape mirror the alienation of the state and the actors within it. And the performances are psychologically intelligent: Jamie Draven plays the traumatised, sedated and institutionalised Hardin convincingly by underplaying the role and Alison Doody is utterly convincing as polished psychopathic prison director Neilson who is so emotionally disconnected that she sees prisoners as objects to be manipulated, programmed and branded.
Appropriately Division 19 is not a film which encourages passive consumption; it requires sustained attention from the viewer. Yet while the twists and turns of the complex plot are at times somewhat hard to follow Division 19 makes the point brilliantly that in a capitalist technoculture we are all prisoners and that redemption lies both in our ability to question and resist the state, and in our bonds and loyalties to others.
Review by andyhalewood-03745 from the Internet Movie Database.