Review of Divergent (2014) by Jesse O — 02 Dec 2014

If you're gonna start a franchise based on a popular YA series, then you just have to make a better impression than this film did. I know the typical arguments from fans...'the book was better' blah, blah, blah.

Of course the book was better, books can be as long as they want to be, because you're reading them on your own free time. Films based on novels simply can't put every little goddamn detail, because they're working on a time limit.

While that time limit might be longer than others, they're still working within a set of "rules" so to speak. So I've never found this 'the books are better' argument to be a valid one.

Besides, and this might piss off a lot of fans of this series, but if it wasn't for The Hunger Games and its massive success, this film wouldn't even be in existence. That series opened up the floodgates for the rest of these series to get their own film adaptations.

Some of them are going to be good and some of them not so good. That's just the name of the game. Where does Divergent stand? It's about somewhere in the middle honestly, maybe a little below the middle.

It's not nearly as bad as it could've been, but it could've been considerably better. I'm not exactly sure how the book reads or how it's paced, but this movie is as slow as molasses.

It takes at least over an hour before it TRULY gets going. It, honestly, is about the 100 minute mark where the film really reveals what the fuck it's supposed to be about. Yes, 100 whole minutes of next-to-nothing.

I realize that Tris needed to train in order to improve her abilities, but that doesn't mean the whole fucking movie had to be her training. It's like if the first Hunger Games movie was 110 minutes of training and the last 20 minutes was the actual games.

The training means nothing if there's no character development, of which there is little to none in the first hour or so. They certainly hint at dissension between Erudite and Abnegation, as the people are divided into 5 factions, all with different purposes, in that way they can be controlled and manipulated properly by the overseers, whomever they fuck they may be.

Erudite are, as the word implies, the smart people...the scientists, the doctors, engineers, etc. Abnegation is the faction that oversees the government. The Dauntless, the faction that Tris chooses, are the protectors of all the other factions.

The cops if you will. Divergents, of which Tris belongs to, don't exactly fit into any of the factions because of the fact that they have true free will. They cannot be manipulated or controlled, so they're seen as a threat by those who want to keep the other factions under their tyrannical control.

So there's some lore going on here. It's just a shame that there's so fucking little of it. Yes, they drop hints about what's gonna happen in the climax, Erudite overthrowing Abnegation as rumors spread of Abnegation's lawbreaking activities, but it takes forever before they truly do anything with this.

I don't think this would've been a great movie either way, but it would've been nice if there had been actual story development. The concepts this film presents aren't exactly new, but at least it's something.

...something that they do nothing with until the last possible chance. Honestly, if the film was gonna be like this, then it didn't need to fucking be almost 140 minutes long, counting credits. There's no justification for it being this long.

Unless Tris' and Four's romance was truly that important. And that's another thing, the romance between Four and Tris was pretty fucking lame. Shailene Woodley, who deserves better than this, and Theo James have some decent chemistry, but it's not like you ever really truly bought that they were in love.

It's just one of those YA cliches, you MUST have a romance subplot, even if it doesn't make any kind of sense in the context of the bigger story you're telling. I fucking hate to do this, but at the very least, in The Hunger Games, Peeta's and Katniss' romance is used as propaganda in order to keep all the other districts in line and to keep them from rebelling.

Even if Peeta and Katniss were just putting on a show, their "romance" serves SOME sort of purpose in the context of the larger story that series is telling. Tris and Four fall in love just because.

It essentially boils down to that. Poor character development in my opinion. Just all around poor character development. Shailene Woodley, as talented as she is, just does not have great physical presence.

At the very least, Jennifer Lawrence looks like she could kick someone's ass if she really wanted to. But Shailene does as good a job as she could with what she was given. I realize that this is the first installment, but first impressions are absolutely everything if you're someone who's completely unfamiliar with this franchise.

I think improvements can definitely be made now that the story is underway, and Tris is on the run after fucking everything up in the factions, so there's at least some incentive to watch the next film.

This is every YA film about set in a post-apocalyptic future you've ever seen. Don't get me wrong, it's certainly watchable, I never thought it was terrible, but it just never really got going as it relates to the story.

It was running in place for far too long and that really affected the overall quality of the film. But it's not a bad movie by any stretch of the imagination. It's just one that, for so much hoopla around the franchise, was a big letdown.

Here's to hoping the sequels fix the first one's many mistakes.