I went into Divergent thinking it was
going to be a piece of crap. The trailer and commercials really
didn't do much to tell us the story or anything about it. All I knew
was that it was based around a 16 year old girl and the world is all
kinds of screwed up. In reality it's a dystopian
future story about class system warfare. I really didn't
get that from the little bit of trailer but yeah... very very Hunger Games-esque. It's easy to see why this
film was chosen to be made at this time, it really follows the beats
that the Hunger Games set. Weak female protagonist who is a teenager,
budding teenage romance, dystopian setting, strangely
set up class system that the film doesn't really explain, the
inability to use a god damn tri-pod and of course the mediocre action
scenes.
This movie has the worst fighting style ever.
The basic story is that in Chicago lives “Tris” (Shailene Diann Woodley), a 16 year old girl who has to choose a caste. She takes a test and is told she is DIVERGENT (ohhh that's where the title comes from!). Which we, as the viewer, don't really know what that means but apparently it gets you a one way ticket to deaths-ville. The person administering the test tells her of this then gives her no more information, leaving Tris, and us completely in the dark. Even after seeing the movie, I don't really know what being divergent means, it seems to give you the ability to shoot stuff and throw knives but I digress. They say that those who are divergent can't be controlled, but they really don't show us how these other people are being controlled so it doesn't make much sense. She picks the black and red clan that specializes in war and peace keeping and they also teach free running for some reason. She starts to get trained by this hunky drill instructor type guy named “Four” (Theo James) and of course they start falling in love instantly. The plot comes into it's own when she learns that someone is trying to over throw the faction who runs the political aspects of their society.
What it does well is
world building. I understand that this film is the first of
(shockingly) a trilogy and all three have already been green lit and
the actors have all been attached for their roles throughout the
series. It does a good job of laying some ground work for the next
few movies but there seems to be this tend in films where they don't feel
the need to tell you everything that is going on. It's the future and
bad stuff went down, even though we don't know what happened we know
it had to be bad because most of Chicago is destroyed. There's no explanation given which pissed me off. Honestly dystopian films from
yesteryear at least had the decency to give us a damn text scroll at the beginning. I
understand that less is more sometimes but man, who gives a flying
fuck that a 16 year old girl is falling in love when we can see the
story of how Chicago fell.
I'm pretty sure the writer came up with these based on Magic: The Gathering mana types.
What the film doesn't
do well is the script. I know it's based on a book so the blame falls mostly on it for the crappy script but man... it is bad. Lines that
are cringe worthy and explanation of scenes that we have just seen (or sometimes while it is happening), this doesn't
make for an enjoyable experience. This movie spoon fed its
audience to a very large degree. Film makers need to not be afraid to
let the intelligence of the audience do some of the obvious work for them. Let us put a few of
the pieces together ourselves. The actors didn't make or break it for me, they
all did an okay job. The special effects were okay, looked like a
good amount of green screen but nothing to crazy.
All in all this film
was pretty okay. It didn't do anything really wrong besides be
written poorly but it didn't really do anything right either. I predict this will be a big box office smash, much like The Hunger
Games. After all this is really just a clone of an already mediocre film.
6/10 Clans that are
based on Magic: The Gathering cards
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