Divergent: not understanding the bad reviews, it was kinda awesome (closed spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

For real, I’m starting the first Divergent thread?!

Metacritic page for Divergent, where you can see that the composite score was at a low 46:

I am not in the demo for this movie, really. My friends regularly have movie night, and I will see something I don’t normally see. Sometimes, I refuse. I almost dropped out tonight, but there were some new peeps I wanted to meet, so it was WTF.

I try to go into anything with an open mind, so I wasn’t rooting against it. But typically a low Metacritic score is a good sign that I won’t like a movie, it’s not really my type of movie (though not the polar opposite), and from I’d heard the Divergent story was kinda a rip of Hunger Games. Well…

I thought it rocked. Perfect? No. It’s hard to create a perfect dystopia, line up all the plot points, avoid all cliches. It’s easy for a movie like this to fail. But it didn’t. Rather:

  1. The acting was really compelling. I liked the lead Shailene Woodley a lot. She really seems to be in the role without a whole lot of ego. You can’t see the wheels turning. Comparisons are made to Jennifer Lawrence. Well, I think Woodley is a lot better, does a better job of playing the action heroine. Nice work!

Bad on me: I thought the Four character was James Franco until I saw the credits roll. Lol. I was thinking, “Wow, Franco is looking jacked, and his acting is really solid and serious. Did he get a nose job?!” Theo James…

Kate Winslet does a good job with a difficult part. All in all, solid performances from the cast.

  1. I couldn’t see where it was going. It’s really not all that predictable.

  2. Solid action and movie thrills.

  3. Good set design, special effects, etc. The movie craft is just damn fine.

So, I really don’t get the negative reviews on Metacritic. This isn’t a bad or sloppy film. It’s actually in my opinion much less predictable, much less cliched, and just better all around than the Hunger Games. Although both worlds are fairly contrived, once you accept the base premise in Divergent (which is not realistic but nevertheless interesting), I think what is shown flows fairly well. Whereas, in the Hunger Games, I feel as though there is a lot of little stuff that doesn’t add up. Though again, there are little things to criticize in Divergent as well.

Thoughts? Have I gone crazy? Explain to me why this movie is getting dissed. Thanks!

2

I’m ambivalent, myself.

3

diver gent …that’s the Greg Louganis biopic, right?

sorry

4

No, you’re think of Diver Down, the Van Halen album.

5

No, it’s Greg Louganis who’s thinking about Van Halen. I’m thinking about dancing in the street because YA sci-fi is being given a new lease on life!

6

Besides the fact that a futuristic Chicago (which is now roughly divided in thirds by all of the races) seems to have become a mostly White city and the fact that by the time anything happened, I was already bored with the film, it wasn’t a complete crap sandwich. More silly than serious, and if I had a hard telling who was what then I know other people would be completely lost.

I would describe it to people as a more intelligent Hunger Games ripoff, although I’m not quite certain that would be complimentary.

7

I was a disappointed. To me, the movie felt “hollow”. I know it’s fiction, but they didn’t have the depth of background to make it feel real.Sort of reminded me of a painted backdrop that looks realistic, but just not quite there.

My nephew said he felt like the books were written to be movies, lacking those intimate, unspoken things that differentiate a book from a movie. Everything from the deep background stuff you usually learn about characters to the wordless looks, which are described in a novel. And he’s right, I think, and the movie is the less for them.

I remember in The Two Towers, when Boromir died, Aragorn took his armbands and put them on. It wasn’t a “big moment”. You don’t see Aragorn removing them from his body, he doesn’t make any reference to it, but as Aragorn and Gimli are getting ready to get in the boat, he’s fastening them on in the background while Gimli’s throwing thing into the boat. Little things that take a story from a cartoon to an epic.

StG

8

This is a bizarre and annoying trope of a lot of sci-fi. It’s just weird that, in a complete reversal of the birthrate trends of the last 200 years, the next 200 years are somehow going to bring us an overwhelmingly white world. /hijack

9

I personally found the main story itself to be fine. My problem was the society and setting which didn’t make enough sense to keep my mind focused on the main story.
Why do they have wonderful technology but still live in bombed out buildings? Can’t they build new buildings or at least repair the old ones? They built a huge wall. What faction do the train operators fall into? Or firemen? Or doctors? Or even (minor plot point but spoiler it anyway):

They made a big deal about not being able to switch factions once you choose, but then it is shown that Tris’s mom switched from dauntless to whatever the Amish faction was called.

10

xizor, to your spoilered point, I thought it was made clear that character switched at the Choosing ceremony; in other words, the character was born in one faction, and switched to the other, just as we saw happen near the beginning of the movie.

I, too, wondered about the train operators.

11

Did you mean “not withstanding” or…?

12

The Matrix movies were good about this, showing a future with a lot of black and brown people.

It’s probably a fair point that Divergent was a little too white. I don’t think it was done on purpose, and one of Tris’s main friends is black…

13

@xizor

[spoiler]

Yes, it’s not explained well, but I don’t think she switched factions after the fact. I think it was that her test results revealed her to be Dauntless but she stayed in Abnegation.[/spoiler]

14

I agreed with the OP. Not a perfect movie by any means, but a solid one.

I thought it was better than the Hunger Games. Neither is particularly innovative, but this one felt like it was better constructed and the movie was able to properly address everything and move along a realistic timeline.

15

I’m pretty sure I’ll be giving this movie a miss, but I have to agree with the OP in liking Shailene Woodley. She was great in The Descendants.

16

She was also good in The Incredible Now (though the movie wasn’t). Her co-star from that had a medium-sized role in Divergent, and seemed to also do a good job here (despite a lack of clear characterization in the script).

17

Umm…the film was cast using professional casting directors. How could it NOT be “on purpose?”

18

IOW, I don’t think they they made a conscious or unconscious decision with respect to the racial makeup of the cast. There are also a lot of extras in this movie and actors with minor roles, so where it was filmed was also probably a factor (I don’t know where it was filmed).

19

Is there an in-story reason the main female character appears so utterly vacant in all the promotional materials?

The first time I saw her, I think it was an Entertainment Weekly cover some time back, I thought, “wow, she looks like a deer caught in the headlights, was this really the best shot they got?” But she has that same “nobody home” look in everything else I’ve seen her in as they’ve built up to this film’s release.

20

It looks like they filmed it in Chicago, itself.

Chicago is only 45% white, so I have to admit that it would take some effort to only hire white extras. Unless the books have something about a genocide having taken place as part of the whole apocalyptisizing, then yeah, either the casting director was a bit racist or someone did some studies and determined that the main audience was white tweens and that they’re easier to sell to with an all-honky cast.