Hunger Games 2.0, this book became incredibly popular when The Hunger Games trilogy finished, and it’s easy to see why it quickly became a new favorite in the dystopian genre. It has a lot of similarities- The population is divided into isolated groups, there are life and death competitions, there’s star crossed lovers, and the main character is a Strong Female Character™, who has to single handedly take on the oppressive leaders in a sort of twist on the Chosen One cliche. I love the Hunger Games, but that doesn’t mean I want to read/watch it again, only with less compelling characters and world building.
Actually, the book was ok. The writing was iffy, and some of the plot twists were predictable (or just didn’t make sense), and I do take issue with some of the pacing, but it was fine. The movie, however...It took everything wrong with divergent, and made it sooo much more obvious.
Tris’ kind of creepy relationship with her mentor became even creepier when a thirty year old guy was cast to play a sixteen year old’s love interest. Shailene Woodley may have been twenty one at the time, but that is still a big age difference between the actors. Tris’ evolution from Abnegation to Dauntless in the book was fast, but it was easy for the reader to fill in gaps and picture her working harder and looking stronger by the time Dauntless initiation comes to an end. In the movie, she only got a little angrier, and suddenly she was this super awesome fighter. There was no obvious change physically. She didn’t gain muscle or really practice and yet it is supposed to be believable that she is improving at such a fast rate and becoming this great fighter. On the topic of fighting, the majority of the fight scenes were either poorly choreographed, obviously staged, or both. The pacing of the movie was also weird. There are scenes where it should have taken a character much longer to complete a last minute save, and there are scenes where it’s just odd, how much time they’re taking to have a conversation in a time sensitive scenario. When writing a book, the laws of physics are bendable, and details are flexible, but when you transfer that to film... you have to make adjustments to pacing that just didn’t happen in this movie. Another thing left out of the movie, was details. There wasn’t a very good explanation of the test in the beginning of the movie, leading to some confusion. There was also little explanation of the dauntless community, and how it worked. Actually, there was little explanation as to how any part of this society worked, unlike in the book. The end of the movie had a huge info dump, though. If they could spread out information throughout the movie, the ending would be a lot more understandable.
I’m not even going to go into why the concept of divergent is also confusing... I know a lot of people in the Divergent universe are divergent but... shouldn’t everyone? Doesn’t everyone have more than one personality trait and a complex moral code? This was the same in the book and the movie,though, so I can’t really dock the movie any points for it.
Overall, this movie was rather dull, and didn’t do anything for the book series. I wouldn’t really recommend it.
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