Divergent Movie Review

Divergent - Movie Review

by Brian Wezowicz

Before I get into my review, I have a confession to make.  I'm a closeted Young Adult (or YA as the cool kids say) fan.  I've read the Hunger Games, and Twilight series (although I'm not as proud to admit that one), and I've seen the movies.  They are fun because they don't require too much concentration, which is a key feature when having a six-month old child.  That being said, I always walk away from these stories thinking, "Hey, I could totally write one of these."  They all seem to follow a simple formula:  1) Strong (but not too strong when you really think about it) female lead.  2)  Future dystopian society  and/or 3) Supernatural features.  4)  Brooding, socially awkward male love interest (or two!  Love triangle alert!) with whom you can't quite figure out why the main heroine falls in love with.  5)  Brooding.  LOTS of brooding. Divergent, based on the worldwide bestseller, is no different.

The world of Divergent is set in the not too distant future.  The remains of society are stowed away in a post-apocalyptic city of Chicago.  The surviving humans are divided into five factions based on their personalities.  Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless (The cool kids), and Erudite.  By adhering to the principles of their faction, in theory, society thrives and the violence that nearly wiped out the human race is vanquished.  There's just one catch (isn't there always a catch?).  A small group of society doesn't fit into a single mold.  They're called Divergent (Hey, that's the name of the movie!).  They are viewed as a threat the the very foundation that holds society together.  They are to be rooted out and destroyed, or so says our main villain (played wickedly by a slumming it in YA fodder Kate Winslet).

Back to the story of the factions.  On your sixteenth birthday, you take an aptitude test that determines which faction you should belong to.  There's an elaborate choosing ceremony (blatantly ripping off the sorting ceremony in Harry Potter, but whatever... young love and brooding!).  Our heroine, Beatrice Prior (played by Shailene Woodley) is part of the boring, government running, totally selfless Abnegation class (or was it one of the other factions?  I have trouble remembering).  She has bigger dreams that don't quite fit one faction.  She finds out during her aptitude test that she's Divergent.  She has to lie about this and choose a faction on her own.  At the sorting hat, er, I mean choosing ceremony, she enlists in the fearless Dauntless faction to the great disappointment of her square parents (Ashley Judd alert!).  The Dauntless don't abide by the normal rules of society. They're the thrill seekers, who jump on and off of moving trains, and climb really tall buildings, and get tattoos.  It's shortly after arriving at the Dauntless compound that Beatrice (now going by the MUCH cooler name of Tris) meets Four (not to be confused with Six from the famed 90's sitcom, Blossom), her distant but irresistible instructor.

This is where the movie takes a sharp left turn from interesting into boring town.  We're 20-25 minutes into the movie when this happens and for the next 3.5 (estimated) hours, we see the Dauntless train... and then brood... train... and then brood.  Sure, there's some interesting war games-style simulations, but this whole chapter of the movie could have been shortened with some cool training montages.  Instead, the director stays a little too accurately to the source material.  Do we really need every single training session?  I get it, Dauntless take risks.  By the end of the training/brooding section of the movie, Tris has transformed from skinny nobody into a skinny somebody.

Another issue I have with this movie is that there is an internal conflict building within the factions... only it's not fully developed enough.  Basically, the smarty pants faction feels that the selfless faction isn't fit for leadership and they develop a serum to turn the Dauntless into mindless soldiers to take over.  There's some whispering about the reasons for doing this, but they seem to take a back seat to the other more YA-ish parts of the film.  This is also where we learn the other aspect of being Divergent that makes them feared.  They are immune to mind control.  Anyway, long story short, there's some interesting action sequences at the end, where good must find a way to triumph over evil.  But, in my opinion, it takes too long to get there.  They focus too much on the training/brooding/star-crossed lovers section of the movie, so that when they get to the good stuff, I was slightly checked out of the movie.

That's not to say that this was a terrible movie.  It just felt like an overextended first act in a much larger story.  Divergent will get compared to the other, better YA trilogy (quadrilogy if you're being picky), The Hunger Games, because of the similarities in structure.  I just think that this series feels like a cheaper knockoff... A Challenge Of The GoBots to the Tranformers if you like.

I am giving this movie two out of four stars.  If you've read the books, you'll probably want to see it.  If you haven't read them, then you should just go rent a copy of the two Hunger Games movies.  It has some good parts to it, and it seems to be building to something bigger, it just takes forever to get going.