{"id":1367,"date":"2024-06-20T10:09:12","date_gmt":"2024-06-20T10:09:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/20\/divinity\/"},"modified":"2024-06-20T10:09:12","modified_gmt":"2024-06-20T10:09:12","slug":"divinity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/20\/divinity\/","title":{"rendered":"Divinity"},"content":{"rendered":"

In a world where the imagination of indie sci-fi can often struggle to match its lower budgets, we can be grateful that \u201cDivinity\u201d (with a \u201cSteven Soderbergh Presents\u201d in the opening and end credits) exists in all of its wacky \u00a0glory. Here is a cornucopia of aesthetics, not for all but definitely for some, that will remind you that not every type of film has been made yet.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

With some squinting, the movie almost plays like an answer to a business whose genres and scales have been eaten away by mega-budget stories, their spectacle numbed by their incessant apocalyptic stakes. Writer\/director Eddie Alcazar seeks to provide the spectacle we are inundated.\u00a0That\u2019s at least how I read a hyper stylized\u00a0stop-motion battle later in the movie\u00a0that\u2019s hopped up on video games, anime, and not following any rules about how action should be done.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDivinity\u201d has a good log-line: two twins (Jason Genoa and Moises Arias) crash into a dying Earth to stop a man named Jaxxon (Stephen Dorff)\u00a0from making an immortality potion named Divinity, that his father (Scott Bakula) had worked on before dying. The potion promises its customers the ability to stop aging in the mind and body, but it\u2019s revealed that the process also demands fetuses, which is bad news for a human civilization with a 97% infertility rate.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

When the twins strike, imprisoning Jaxxon and pumping him with his shallow salvation juice, the side effects are monstrous. His head grows macho muscles over his eyes, and a\u00a0Frankenstein arc begins.\u00a0The special effects in “Divinity”\u00a0are great, and so is Dorff\u2019s performance in the process. With so much on its mind and in its aesthetic arsenal, this plot is\u00a0overshadowed by more indulgent passages about the anti-salvation of Divinity. Such passages involve Jaxxon\u2019s mega-buff brother (Michael O\u2019Hearn) and his universe of skin, muscle, and conventional beauty.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Sometimes\u00a0star power seems like an endorsement, and that’s certainly the effect here:\u00a0its actors have their names flash in its intense opening credit sequences, and then they get to ham it up; they are in on \u201cit,\u201d whatever \u201cit\u201d is. A stern Bella Thorne plays a cult leader named Ziva; she is\u00a0flanked by a\u00a0coven of young women in white spandex, and a vessel for some of the story\u2019s sanctimonious lines. Karreuche Tran\u2019s docile Nikita\u00a0may be the world\u2019s only hope, though she is unaware of it when caught up in bed\u00a0with the twins.\u00a0Scott Bakula appears in flashbacks we mostly see from VHS clips, talking about his attempts to crack\u00a0the formula for Divinity. This is just a taste of the\u00a0always off-kilter world of Alcazar’s film, which fuses analog technology, modern architecture, and\u00a0pessimistic futurism all together.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDivinity\u201d is a thoroughly alien film\u2014apart from feeling like an\u00a0a cinematic piece of outsider art, it speaks its own language. That makes it compelling but also confounding regarding what it wants to say\u2014is it condemning machismo with its scenes of conventionally beautiful people\u00a0who take Divinity or indulging in it? There are so many specific choices to this production, which is like an alien transmission to comment on all of society, including our value of superficial beauty or our selfishness with resources.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In a world where the imagination of indie sci-fi can often struggle to match its lower budgets, we can be grateful that \u201cDivinity\u201d (with a \u201cSteven Soderbergh Presents\u201d in the opening and end credits) exists in all of its wacky \u00a0glory. Here is a cornucopia of aesthetics, not for all but definitely for some, that …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[44,48,51],"class_list":["post-1367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction-movies","tag-fantasy","tag-horror","tag-science-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1367\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}