Director: Neil Burger
Writers: Evan Daugherty, Vanessa Taylor, Veronica Roth
Genre: Sci-Fi
Plot: In a world divided by factions based on virtues, Tris learns she’s Divergent and won’t fit in. When she discovers a plot to destroy Divergents, Tris and the mysterious Four must find out what makes Divergents dangerous before it’s too late.
Cast: Shailene Woodley as Tris
Theo James as Four
Kate Winslet as Jeanine
Zoë Kravitz as Christina
Review:
Divergent is yet another bestselling novel I’ve never heard about, and part of yet another young adult trilogy, by yet another female writer (Veronica Roth) I’ve, again, never heard about. Also, this is yet another movie I would never have watched, had I not had to write this blog – basically because it looks awful, boring and unoriginal. Before I turn this into a rant against this newest fashion everyone seems to be crazy about, I’ll talk about the movie. Divergent is probably best summed up in an anecdote: while trying to point out the difference between The Hunger Games and Divergent, the latter’s director Neil Burger started explaining what it was about – and his explanation could have easily been applied to both movies. Ironically, Divergent hails individuality while being a copycat itself.
Divergent is set in a post-apocalyptic Chicago, where people are divided in five factions, depending on their virtues: the Erudite are smart, the Amity are kind, the Candor honest, the Dauntless brave and the Abnegation selfless. Beatrice (Shailene Woodley) and her family are Abnegation, but she and her brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort) have to take the aptitude test to determine which faction they truly belong to. Beatrice’s results are inconclusive, she’s dubbed Divergent and must keep this secret. Eventually, she chooses the Dauntless faction and starts a difficult training after which the weakest ones will be cast out and become factionless – all the while, hiding her true, Divergent nature, as Divergents are being hunt down and killed.
Surprisingly, Divergent didn’t turn out to be as bad as I thought it would be. It might be because the director is Neil Burger, who also directed Limitless and The Illusionist, which are good movies. Also, the acting isn’t bad, although, sometimes, somewhat underwhelming. This applies especially to Kate Winslet, who plays the ‘bad girl’ in the movie, the Erudite Jeanine – and the fact that she’s bad is evident from the first moment she’s on screen, just because she’s cold and falsely kind. Her character isn’t developed any further, she remains irritatingly perfect, as if that was enough to make a good villain. But in this case, the problem is mostly of the screenwriters – and probably the novelist, who created the interesting setting and faction system, but didn’t exploit their potential fully or elaborate them enough to avoid plot holes and inconsistencies.
As I mentioned before, the movie reminds much of The Hunger Games, but I don’t see that as the movie’s (or the book’s) bad quality. What surprises me is that, after all those silly young adult flicks we’ve had and still have, people and mostly teenagers are, once again, interested in the same old story – just check out Divergent’s box office results. The market is saturated and it’s extremely difficult to create a new YA series that will be truly good anymore. Divergent (the movie, but I doubt the book is better, at least story-wise) isn’t good: it’s predictable, filled with cliches, boring, too long, unoriginal and so on. And still, the book came out and it was a success, and the movie came out and was a success, too – and this will most likely happen to all the other similar novels and movies that will be published in the future. I can only say, if you want to get rich fast, just write a teen love story, with a wannabe social commentary, not set on out planet and/or in our time, and you’re guaranteed to succeed.
Rating:
Pass the Popcorn! 