'The Divide' Sounds like a Depressing Night at the Movies

COMMENTARY | Coming Soon has posted the opening scene to a film called "The Divide," a post apocalyptic thriller that appears to be one of the most depressing stories ever put to film. It also has some mistakes surrounding the effects of a nuclear blast.

The story is about eight people who make it to a bomb shelter just as a nuclear explosion wipes out New York City. The isolation, the close proximity of people who would have been difficult to live with in normal times, and the diminishing supplies combine to cause horrors that match what must be occurring on the outside. The denizens of the bomb shelter start to destroy one another out of frustration, rage, and fear.

That certainly looks like something enjoyable to watch for 90 or so minutes in the dark. It sounds like the sort of movie one should avoid if one wants one's spouse or significant other to speak to one ever again. One would have thought that with the end of the Cold War, these kinds of movies would be considered quaint and obsolete, like watching "The Day After" and "Threads" and vaguely remembering what all the fuss was about. But the prospect of nuclear terrorism seems to have brought the whole genre back with a vengeance.

At the very least, those past Cold War era movies, in which everybody dies, had a purpose, albeit a misguided one, of trying to convince people it was better to be red than dead. This movie is supposed to convey what? That people are animals when put under stress?

In the spirit of nitpicking, one has to wonder what the young woman in the opening scene staring with horrid fascination at the mushroom cloud rising above Manhattan thinks she's doing. Looking at a nuclear flash is a good way to get blind in an agonizing instant.

Indeed, all of those people clawing over one another in a panic to get to the basement shelter might just as well not bother. They may well be dead already, depending on how solid their building is, from the radiation from the nuclear blast. The best way to survive a nuclear explosion is to not be anywhere near it.

Source: Watch the Opening Scene of The Divide, Coming Soon, Dec 9, 2011