Division 19

I've been a big fan of Jamie Draven for a while and hoped he would crop up somewhere. In Division 19 he plays a drugged-up prisoner experiment in a kind of Big Brother for jails. Once out, he realizes just how famous he is and tries to hide in a city and world he no longer recognizes. There is a great support cast in Toby Hemingway, Linus Roache and Clarke Peters and while the film is sometimes hard to follow, the endgame is worth it.

A way cool thriller about our near future not the teen action flicker the poster suggests.

Division 19 is a low-budget science fiction and a study of the politics of surveillance, data mining and state control gone very bad. While these themes may have been covered before, they are still prescient in a world of fake news, data manipulation and DNA swabs. Hardin Jones is a prisoner in a jail open to a public able to vote online on his life choices. For the prison industrial complex he is the golden goose. To the CEO of that complex, he is maybe something more. So when Jones (a sympathetically zoned out Jamie Draven) escapes, Neilsen (Alison Doody) wants him back. While on the outside Jones experiences a world he cannot survive due in part to his face appearing on every screen across the city. While inside, his baby brother Nash (Will Rothhaar) has joined a band of cyber-geeks who survive off grid in the sewers and rooftops of the unnamed and crumbled city. The youthful posse known as DIVISION 19 is blackmailing the government – led by Charles Lyndon (Linus Roache) - with threats to destabilize the power grid, banks and therefore the economy. Popular with the voters (who get to leave work early thanks to an early lights out) the cyber punks must either be stopped or listened to – a choice which flags the main theme of the film – if we continue to employ the same methods – we will forever find ourselves with the same outcome. While there may be a few too many elements – the plot in itself is somewhat convoluted – the themes are resonant and disturbing. While we, the citizens, may have the power to change the world – the obstacles before of are sometimes those of our own making. For Manning, Snowden and Assange, standing up to be counted was brave and led to their public demise. But as a collective (i.e. Anonymous) that could be a gamechanger. DIVISION 19 is not without its faults (the plethora of subjects being one) but it is well-written, acted with subtlety, looks way bigger than its meager budget and is a timely reminder that nothing will or can change, unless we have the will.