Title: Divergent
Genre: Drama, Action, Sci-Fi
Director: Neil Burger
Writer: Screenplay - Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor, Novel - Veronica Roth
Starring: Shailene Woodley, Theo James, Kate Winslet, Maggie Q
Tagline: In a world bound within the realms of legalized segregation, a girl tries to change the future and shit while getting at that D.
Grade: C
Good Movie For: Young Adult Fiction Enthusiasts, Segregation Supporters, Jack Dawson
My movie watching patterns are sporadic. Sporadic enough to maybe consider that there are no patterns at all. What can I say. I like living outside the box. But there is no box.
So that being said, I pretty much would be up for watching any genre or type of movie. I almost watched Hansel and Gretel Get Baked last week. Almost. When my friend asked to watch Divergent on the back end of our movie marathon day, I wholeheartedly agreed to go.
So that being said, I pretty much would be up for watching any genre or type of movie. I almost watched Hansel and Gretel Get Baked last week. Almost. When my friend asked to watch Divergent on the back end of our movie marathon day, I wholeheartedly agreed to go.
I'm a bit of a young adult softy. I watched and read the entire Twilight series. What? I was young. I was impressionable. This all might have happened last week. Whatever. Let me live my life. So, Divergent wasn't out of the spectrum of my movie watching prow less. Some set up with this reviewy thing, my friend read the books. I didn't. We had slightly differing stances on the film.
From a reader perspective, my friend liked that the movie stayed true to the book. Every scene that was depicted was properly derived from the book. From my perspective I didn't know what the fuck in hell of all christ was going on. I mean it wasn't entirely hard to follow, but I just couldn't see where the story was going at all at any point in the movie. Some people might take that as a good thing, that the storyline kept me guessing, but I think it's just lazy. Maybe not lazy per se, but too much to the book.
My biggest reason why I didn't love this movie was because there wasn't a single storyline throughout. When I know the film is heavily set in a narrative structure I try and imagine what the end scene would be. Sometimes I get it right. Sometimes I get it wrong. With Divergent there were multiple times where I thought the film would come to an organic end. Then it kept going. And kept going. And kept going.
The ending also seemed too tied up at the end. Knowing that this was a trilogy I expected there to be a huge cliffhanger to propel the audience to anxiously wait another year before the story commenced again, but with Divergent, the ending eluded to a much bigger picture, but it also gave a lot of resolution which made it feel as if the story could end there without the emergence of a Part 2 and Part 3. I probably should have read the book, but ehhh. I'll see this again next year when FX decides to sandwich it in between the saga that is Twilight.
