Divergent

I'll admit it, I didn't give Divergent a fair chance.

To be fair, the movie didn't warrant it that much. I basically went in thinking that this would be a Hunger Games rip off and because of that, it would never quite reach the level of popularity or quality that The Hunger Games reached. While I'm still not totally convinced that it will, I still didn't go into this movie giving it enough credit and enough of a chance to see if I would actually like it.

Luckily, the movie kind of surprised me.

I'm going to explain the set up for this movie as best as I can and it runs the risk of being two things. 1. Overly complicated. 2. Sounding exactly like the Hunger Games. I'll try and differentiate it as best as I can without putting so much effort into it as to look up the SIT words used for the different factions... I don't really wanna look those up.

Divergent takes place in a dystopian future where, after a war to end all wars, the remaining people, living in Chicago, are divided into factions. These factions were set up by the new founding fathers of sorts and are meant to put people where they are best fit and best served to help the common good.

There's the smart people who do all.. the smart stuff? I think its like research and... smart stuff, they don't really show a lot of what they do unless they're doing evil things... these are your evil guys, its not hard to pick up on. Then you have your farmers and those who are kind... but not kind enough to be selfless I guess. Then you have your justice people, the people who believe in honesty and are basically the judicial branch. Then you have the Dauntless who are basically your soldiers, they defend the city... or just play games... And then you have Abnigation... or Abignaliation or something like that and they are your selfless people who believe that all they need to do is help others. Not totally sure how they're different from the kind people but in sort, Kind people do the farming, selfless people help the poor and govern.

Now... maybe its the point of the book/movie, cause this is one of those adult series. Maybe its explained more there, but my question is, if everyone is in a faction that is meant to help the common good, then why is there a faction that is just there to help people. And I get that there eventually needs to be political strife and conflict but why give all the power to one faction? Wouldn't it make more sense to turn it into a council, one person from each faction is on the council? Also, there's like weird cultural differences between the factions, like selfless people don't want to believe in vanity so they don't have mirrors and can't dress lavishly... you know... I'm not gonna question this that much... its a YA film.

And honestly, really I am nitpicking. It is an interesting concept if you don't think too much about it. That doesn't exactly make it brilliant but its kind of one of those things you have to suspend disbelief for a little bit and just go with the story.

So the story follows are Katniss for the evening as Beatrice, or Tris as she's eventually called (played by Shailene Woodley) is coming of age to take the test to choose her faction. So basically, the test gives you a series of choices and depending on which choice you get, the test tells you which faction you should be in. But the part that always gets left out in the explanation is that you still get to choose. Now if you grow up in one faction, and choose the other, you can't go back and see your family. So there's a weird dynamic of what do you choose, the right faction or your family. I wish that was something that was developed a little bit more in the story but they kind of just melt it down to "Faction before Blood" which I guess makes sense but I think there's a lot of interesting stuff they could go into with that.

Oh and if you get cut or you don't like your faction, you're factionless and you can't go back to your family, you're just kind of a blight on humanity and you're homeless. There's probably some kind of commentary on that but the factionless really don't have a point in this movie except be a motivation for Tris not to fail.

So Tris takes the test and instead of getting a conclusive answer, she turns out to be something of everything which is called Divergent. As explained by her test taker (played by Maggie Q) Divergents pose a threat to society... some how and she must keep her test results a secret.

So Tris must now decide which faction to go into.

Now... oddly enough, the whole thing that makes this society different is only in the first half hour of the movie. Sure the faction system is a thing in the rest of the movie but the big seller of this book/movie is the whole click choosing at the beginning.

The weird thing is, when Tris gets Divergent... its almost like she chooses randomly. She's about to choose her families faction and then says, you know, fuck that, I want to be Dauntless. I'm sure its explained better in the book but its really kind of random. There's no inclination that Tris ever wanted to be in Dauntless, or any other faction other than the selfless one, even though she didn't feel like she totally belonged there. But she just goes with Dauntless. Why? Cause its the cool group? I mean it is. I don't understand how any 16 year old would not choose Dauntless.

But anyway she chooses Dauntless and the rest of the movie is her training to fight in the Hunger Games...

No... but it looks like she is.

In short, she starts training with Dauntless, all the while trying to keep her Divergent identity a secret among a conspiracy between the factions.

In her training she's accompanied by her friends training along side her. Her instructors (played by Jai Courtney and Theo James), and the stereotypical douchebags who are the douchebags because they're written as the douchebags (AKA Miles Teller AKA future Mr. Fantastic).

The more I think about it, the movie is really kind of a training movie, its like if the Hunger Games didn't actually happen and we just showed Katniss training for 6 weeks before going into the Hunger Games. I can only imagine they are building up to that revolution... damn this story is a lot like the Hunger Games.

There is a little bit of a conflict at the end which you probably could have seen a mile away.

See Kate Winslet plays an intelligent person. I don't know her name, I just always saw her as Kate Winslet. She's also suppose to be the President Snow of the story. Its kind of painfully obvious. Sorry if that's any kind of spoiler but by this point you should know that.

Also there's this weird relationship brewing between her and her instructor who is named Four (played by Theo James). In the book I guess he's 18 and she's 16. In real life James is 28, Woodley is 21. Its not the creepiest thing in the world but while you watch the movie I couldn't but help and just mention the fact that the relationship between her and Four is kind of creepy. I know its a Young Adult story and there needs to be a romance... but they're not even subtle about it and its still kind of creepy.

I apologize if I've been shitting on this movie. Believe it or not, I liked this movie a lot more than I thought I would.

That's mainly because, while this movie feels like the author of this book read the Hunger Games and said, "Eh, I can do better", there are elements of the movie that are actually kind of cool. Maybe they're just stealing from other places, I like to call it, getting inspiration from other places.

Part of the Dauntless training, and just in this society overall, there's this interesting computer program they go into and they face their darkest fears. Its got this weird dynamic between ripping off Inception and ripping off The Matrix. Ripping off is a hard word because it actually is kind of cool when they're in the simulation. I wish the majority of the movie had been in those simulations because that's when things were actually really cool.

Oddly enough, these simulations are kind of the thing that set Divergent apart from other YA franchises and nobody makes mention of that. That's actually the really cool part of the film.

I don't know, this film is difficult because on face value, it doesn't really feel incredibly new or ground breaking, but then you watch it and it is kind of a cool set up when you see it in action. The acting is decent enough for a YA film, Shailene Woodley is decent and I liked her more than I liked JLaw in the first Hunger Games. Theo James strikes me more as a piece of eye candy for the ladies. Her friends and family are decent enough. A part of me was interested to see Jai Courtney as he is going to be in some big name franchises in the future like Terminator and Suicide Squad. He actually wasn't that bad in this film. I don't want to say I'm a Jai Courtney fan now but I'll give him some rope for Suicide Squad.

I think as a whole, Divergent is by no means a bad film. It can be kind of fun. Divergent seems to me to be more of a prologue for a larger story. As it stands, its an interesting look into this dystopian future that unfortunately focuses more on the young adult themes instead of the infrastructure of this environment.

However, that's not what this film was trying to accomplish.

Divergent definitely got me interested in the franchise and my interest in Insurgent actually went up after seeing this. I feel like now that the mediocre stuff building up to a war or an insurgency is done, we can get to the interesting stuff... hopefully. We'll just have to wait and see when Insurgent comes out.

I don't really know where I fall when it comes to this movie beyond saying, its not horrible. Its not incredibly original but at the same time there are a lot of elements of the movie that are interesting while there are a lot of cliches and YAisms that I could do without. Overall, I think I liked Divergent and at the very least it has my attention. Maybe Insurgent will get my curiosity.

But those are my thoughts on Divergent. What did you think about the film? Comment and Discuss below! Or shoot me a Tweet @cmhaugen24 on Twitter and Follow me to get updates on future movie reviews and news.

I'll leave you with this. Here is the trailer for Insurgent and here is the Honest Trailer for Divergent, I'll admit I stole a little bit of the criticism from this trailer but they were kind of low hanging fruit. Enjoy!