Divinity

From the script writers to the director, my suggestion would be not to quit your day job. Sure going B&W adds to the ambience, but after that the entire flick went south rather quick. With actors standing staring into the camera with that "there's nothing functioning between the ears look on their face. I'm assuming that when danger is looking you ion the eyes, your best course of action is to stand there with that "What way did they go George" look while the bad/good guy recuperates. I find it so annoying as well as extremely stupid for these writers to make out everyone as being devoid of good old fashion common sense. Makes for a movie that would caused normal people to get up and demand a full refund of their theater tickets "if they were fools enough to actually pay to witness this debacle of a Sci-fi movie. And the final fight scene was utterly ridicules with the big deformed scientist standing around waiting for the vertical challenged brother to again recuperate, climb up the rock base for the final ending of this completely unbelievable fight sequence. Now the ending with the birth of a tree from the prostitute you did a threesome with the two brothers and give birth to a p0lant mere minutes after coitus was a genuine WTH moment and had me thinking which one was the daddy. Plot holes galore, weak script writing coupled with a director who needs another occupation spells out, Avoid at all cost.

Divinity is a very stylized, black and white sci-fi/horror adjacent/thriller. Destined to be divisive, but very much worth checking out if the trailer peaked your interest. The film is very strange but I was never lost. There is a clear and defined plot that isn't convoluted. The acting is rough around the edges, the dialogue is not polished, but in many ways this contributes to the style of the film. That's not to say this movie is "so bad it's good." The style will not work for everyone though. The one thing that is inarguable is the movie's ability to stay cemented in your brain. This is a movie that I don't believe will leave your mind so quick like a big budget Hollywood film. Is this movie empty, vapid and all style over substance? Is it a deep and meaningful reflection about what humans value? For me, somewhere in between but nonetheless a very entertaining film. Divinity will definitely find its audience but it still isn't the next Blade Runner. Check it out.

It struggles to be an artsy presentation but fails. Bakula's performance is good. That is the only good point, and the only reason I give 4 stars. I do not give points for effort when the production directing efforts seem to be more about how to make it as cheaply as possible while pretending it is an artsy film. The black and white is extremely poor quality throughout the entire film, grainy and unwatchable, as if that is supposed to make me appreciate this more. Put it in color and teach the actors how to deliver lines, I'd give it a better score. But, they obviously wanted it presented this way, and thought people would love it. The actors (other than Bakula) each move and speak as if they were born without emotioin, live without emotion, and die without emotion. WAKE UP. If people were really like this - they wouldn't CARE about living forever.

This movie seemed a bit hard to rate, but not impossibly so. Let's list the positives: First of all--Scott Bakula and Stephen Dorff. Sad that they've aged, who who doesn't. They're still great actors. (This film doesn't seem to fit either one of them too well, for reasons outlined below.) Second--It's B&W. Edgy, but it fits the cool desert, retro-futuristic, mid-century sci-fi vibe. All the scientific equipment looks 1960ish and the vehicle we get to see reinforces this. Oh, and casette tapes. There's ads on the telly for WW2 British commodities you can buy with ration cards (like powdered eggs). The rest seem to be steeped in sex and excess, including the most disgusting breakfast cereal commercial ever created. Third--Cool, mid-century avant-garde desert palace homes. The scientist's lair sort of blends into the rock outcroppings. Not my taste, but this is unique. His brother's home is a boxy, glass affair in the middle of the desert plain, also of similar provenance. Now for the negatives: This film had really bad dialogue and the plot was all chopped up. Imagine a bad mortal kombat, stop-motion fight sequence, gratuitous violence, scene progression that makes no sense, bizarre and unclear moties and other movie tropes thrown in together. It doesn't seem to hold up. Later, I discovered that aside from the basic plot outline, there was NO script (imagine that) and it doesn't feel like the actors were actually directed too closely at all. It's avante-garde and experimental and throwback. Interesting CGI effects where leotard clad women sort of appear into the landscape (bones first) and then carry off fertile women to join their cult to 'save' humanity. That was cool, but strange. The basic premise is that an immortality serum engineered by the scientist's father and perfected by his son has so thoroughly corrupted the world that everyone lives for pleasure. Oh, and it sterilises all the women who take it. Not a great plan. Scientist decides to ratchet it up to not only grant immortality, but to dial back the clock and grant eternal youth for those who aged prior to the original serum. It has a dark side to how it's produced. Can't figure out who the dream girls or the semi-supernatural brothers are supposed to be, either, but the brothers took on human bodies and then gave them up. They give the pleasure-girl a mental enema so she can see stars and her eyes can light up, too. She's pure, so she gets 'saved' by dream girl cult and bears a tree with living sausages all the girls in dream girl cult seem to love. The father is apparently one of the supernatural brothers who fell in love with her and with being human. There's lots of sex in this film and most of it is kinda' gross. Scientist's brother is a body-builder and has a body-builder 'companion' and a body-builder servant who fawns over him and seems to have an electric-shock *. Truly bizarre character development. Old doc becomes an incredible hulk because the supernatural brothers force-feed him his new serum to punish him (or 'free' him, they can't seem to make up their minds). Everything comes to a head on the scientist's birthday and it gets really gross and nasty. One word: disappointing.