It is really really hard to find a new near future Sci-Fi film or series that isn’t soaked in Blade Runner, Ghost in the Shell, District 9 or 2001: A Space Odyssey. Often they have a great set dresser or costume department, maybe even a DP who learned everything from Jordan Cronenweth, but the script, after a brief text crawl giving some sort of unique twist on how technology screwed us all up yet again, descends into a painfully vapid series of over-choreographed hand to hand combat, middle of the road After Effects, bleach bypass color timing and even more cliche, sub-par performances.

But I still watch. Whether it is Altered Carbon or The Expanse, Electric Dreams or sundry low budget affairs with great posters that stuff the catalog of Amazon Prime – and sometimes, just every so often – I see a cool new idea, a new spin, an interesting moment that makes it kinda worth it.

So here we have Division 19 from director Suzie Halewood – from all appearances a cross between Elysium and Edtv, mixed with Hunger Games and HBO’s OZ. The Running Man (it is pretty The Running Man, plotwise).

The premise is that people get sent to prison for whatever reason and must fight their way to freedom by winning their way to freedom in what is essentially a Big Brother snuff film broadcast on every available surface of this dystopian version of Los Angeles, creatively titled “PrisonTV.”

Bleach bypass? Check. Anamorphic flares? Check. Giant screen TVs on buildings? Check.

In what may by design be a slow, contemplative pace, the first 15 minutes are generally uneventful and full of handheld shots of Los Angeles, where I live – the only amazing thing about them being how empty the streets are. Actors with authentically interesting accents and some excellent capabilities, including Linus Roache (Mandy), Clarke Peters (the Wire), seethe lines about plans and plots and what should have been and how to stick it to the man.

If this were an intellectual thought piece, where characters drive the focus and interest, then I could understand the pace and tone – but the story really isn’t so interesting and, despite their best efforts – the actors can only work with that they are served and they all do competent work here.

On Ontology

What people tend to miss about Blade Runner is that it is seldom talking about itself or even self conscious of its own world. The world is incidental. What matters to those characters is meaning. It is one of the most perfect ontological treatise I have seen captured in a movie. In Division 19 – people get slammed up against chain link fences, rim lights rim, drone atmospheric soundtracks drone and the plot and the world is what is discussed.

I ask – in a world of rapidly emerging machine learning, foldable phones, hyperloops, volumetric capture, quantum computing and all the other stuff that will seem as quaint as AOL installation CDs in a couple of years – can Sci-Fi writers not go deeper into conjecture?

I will say that the humorous little cartoon insertions about the joys of the RFID chip injection procedures affords a chilling echo of the the RealID initiative currently being rolled out across the US, and the Chinese Social Credit System.

If anything, Division 19 will serve as a wonderful nugget of cultural anthropology – a view of Los Angeles, circa 2019 – ironically the year in which Blade Runner took place, and looked far more strange and esoteric than this cynical postulation of an empty and culture-free reality with no redeeming qualities.

Also, there are some nice anachronistic, and counter-intuitive music choices – piano waltzes, acoustic guitars or Vic Damone singing Stranger in Paradise in Kismet – and the like. Also the sound design is good, bringing the various VFX and subtle details to life.

A Polite Approach

Nothing I say here is out of spite for this film – in fact, there are some nice settings, interesting looks, some tender moments present here that elevate it above similar fare – it is more the wish that we could get away from the completely overused tropes of the genre and create some new lines of thinking. The very nature of the medium is to speculate on possible outcomes and advancements and cautionary tales, but just relying on the same aesthetics, shots, characters, stilts the possibilities.

The idea that everything we do will be televised as a reality seems quaintly archaic in a world nearing the end of Tik Tok and Instagram. To be honest Idiocracy felt more prescient. I think that the present reality is not only more advanced but far scarier. This notion that there will be a future not wholly affected by climate change, mass migrations of populations, spatialized technologies like VR and AR (and whatever terminology we will ultimately used for same,) is getting harder to omit as a point of departure from the present.

Division 19 reaches theaters for a limited engagement April 2019 from Uncork’d Entertainment.