Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Eddie Alcazar
Starring: Stephen Dorff, Scott Bakula, Moises Arias, Jason Genao, Bella Thorne, Emily Willis, Karrueche
Tran
One of the current talking points among conservatives is the idea that
childless people are selfish sociopaths who should be punished by paying
higher taxes than those with families. You would think if anyone should be
penalised it's those who are jeopardising our future with the pitter patter
of extra carbon footprints, but no, not having children is an act of
unmitigated evil to this lot, never mind that many people simply can't
afford to bring children into the world, or are physically unable to do so,
or are self-aware enough to admit that they simply wouldn't make very good
parents. The odd thing about the conservative argument against the childless
is that it paints raising a family as an act of sacrifice, of duty, as
though it's as miserable as being deployed to Fallujah. In reality most
people raise families because they derive pleasure from doing so.
Writer/director Eddie Alcazar's threadbare sci-fi
Divinity pushes this idea that the childless are a bunch of
narcissists who aren't willing to sacrifice their fun lives for the sake of
having children. It's set in a world where an anti-aging drug (the titular
"Divinity") has been developed to the point where it offers its users
something close to immortality. Trouble is, it has the unfortunate side
effect of rendering its users impotent. Despite this, we're told that 97% of
the population has opted for eternal youth over the ability to have a
family, and the film paints this lot as superficial to a sociopathic degree,
choosing pleasure over procreation. As an allegory it simply doesn't hold
up, as in our real world billions of people gladly make the trade-off of
aging prematurely by putting themselves through the physical and mental
strain of bearing and raising children.
The 97% are visually portrayed as the inverse of the obese humans of
Wall-E. Here the men are all ridiculously jacked bodybuilders while the women
look like supermodels. The cast is largely made up of bodybuilders,
socialites, influencers and porn stars, i.e. people who rely on their
physicality to make a living, which makes you wonder why they would agree to
appear in a movie that outright mocks their life choices.
Alcazar claims he worked without a script, and boy does it show. What
little plot there is revolves around Jaxxon Pierce (Stephen Dorff), a
scientist who took his father's (Scott Bakula) revolutionary
anti-aging formula and has continually developed it despite its grave
side-effects. A pair of alien brothers played by Moises Arias and
Jason Genao materialise via a portal outside Jaxxon's home in the
desert and hold him hostage, giving him doses of Divinity to the point where
he begins to physically morph into a cross between John Merrick and the
Hulk. Meanwhile a sex worker (Karrueche Tran) arrives at Jaxxon's
mansion and mistakes the alien brothers for her clients, getting wrapped up
in their antics. Elsewhere on some other plane of reality is a race of
fertile women clad in skin tight catsuits who observe all this and tut tut
like a Greek chorus scripted by Neil Breen. For a movie interrogating and
critiquing the commodification of youth and beauty, the camera sure does
spend an awful lot of time lingering over the bodies of fit young
women.
There's barely enough material here to hold our interest for a 20 minute
short, making Divinity a largely insufferable experience. The
use of black and white in modern movies is often reductively labelled as
"pretentious" by boring people, but it's deployment here doesn't help the
case against such arguments. Some critics have praised the visuals, but
aside from a fight scene that uses a bespoke stop-motion technique Alcazar
has named "Metascope", there isn't much in the way of eye-candy here, unless
you count the attractive female cast. The monochrome cinematography is often
murky to the point where you'll find yourself involuntarily squinting. The
production design does little to stand out from similar sci-fi movies, stuck
in that '70s aesthetic. A Fellini-esque scene of partying beautiful people
is filmed in a way that makes the whole affair look gross, which suggests
the primary inspiration for Alcazar's film is John Frankenheimer's black and
white sci-fi allegory Seconds, in which a wealthy schlub undergoes revolutionary surgery to resemble
Rock Hudson. If you're seeking a movie that explores our obsession with
beauty and vitality with some depth, I'd suggest opting for
Seconds, rather than the sloppy seconds of Divinity.
Divinity is on Shudder from August
2nd.
