Movie Review : Divergent (2014)
I am notoriously not fond of movies marketed to teenagers, although I liked THE HUNGER GAMESseries. Not the novels, but the movies with screenplays almost scrubbed clean of bullshit adolescent romance. The story was flat out good and would've worked without the shackles of a Young Adult fiction marketing label. It was also a savage assault on every sexist and phallocratic asshole in the universe. One I could get behind.
David Foster Wallace one said that for every original thinker, there would be ''crank-turners''who would spin their ideas in every possible angle in order to make money, so that original thinkers would have to keep pumping new ideas into the world to keep art alive. DIVERGENT is an opportunistic movie, based on an opportunistic series of novels, that was conveniently publishedone year after the closing of THE HUNGER GAMES trilogy. It's not a violently bad movie, but it's bad enough to be depressing.
In a distant future (identified in the novels as a post-apocalyptic Chicago), the civilized world is trapped within the walls of the city, and society has been split in 5 factions based on values: Abnegationfor selfless people, Amity for the hippies, Candor for the honest (that would've been mine), Dauntlessfor the brave and Eruditefor the clever people. Beatrice Prior (Shailene Woodley, also known as Jennifer Lawrence light) is a born Abnegation who happens to be the ruling faction.
Young people can actually choose their faction at a certain age, during a ceremony, yet they need to forever assume their choice afterwards. There is a test prior to the ceremony that is meant to indicate which faction Beatrice biologically belongs to. The result is that Bearice is Divergent, she could fit in many factions. Divergent people are not welcome in post-apocalyptic Chicago, because they think outside the box. Beatrice chooses to leave Abnegation for Dauntlessduring the ceremony, failing to surprise anybody, and decides to rename herself Tris. Now she has to protect her secret and just about everybody else. Oh, there is Four (Theo James), also. A smoking hot and soulful Dauntless instructor. Because there needs to be one, right?
Whew, thas was complicated! To be honest, I thought DIVERGENT was really cute, for about an hour. Of course, it's a HUNGER GAMES ripoff structured around an existential gimmick, but I thought it was a cute way to break existentialism to kids. It will never beat the way I learned about it, by seeing John Rambo making and assuming the choice of murdering an entire country to avenge the death of his only love, but I am conscious that having Sylvester Stalloneas a professor of life is a privilege. I enjoyed seeing Tris being confronted to the harsh reality of her choice and having to fight her way through the ranks of leather clad, cocained fueled parkour maniacs. She holds her own as a strong female lead in the rather poor landscape of strong female leads in cinema. The first hour of DIVERGENTvery quiet, almost intimate coming-of-age experience, but I felt itwas staying within itself, you know?
Look, it's the guy from that FOOTLOOSE remakein a bizarre fighting stance.
About an hour in, the plot of DIVERGENT kicked in and the movie took a sharp turn into the corn field. Remember when I was saying that Divergent people were being chased? That still makes sense, you know? That a movie would present free thinkers as valuable, with the potential to change the fabric of society. What doesn't make sense at all is how they're being chased in DIVERGENT. Basically, the Dauntless(the warrior faction) and the Erudite(the scientists) team up together in an absolutely one-sided fascistic relationship in hope to smoke every Divergent person out of their hole. One night, every Dauntless soldier is just injected with a serum made by the Eruditethat turns them into Divergent-hating murder zombies. Why would the Dauntless surrendered their entire faction to the Erudite? Tell me please, because I don't understand. Since the beginning of the movie, the Dauntlessstress the importance of following orders, yet when it's time to do so, they don't trust the free will of their soldiers and turn them into mindless murderers? At that point I was like ''NOOOOO, DIVERGENT FOR THE LOVE OF EVERYTHING BEAUTIFUL, STAY WITHIN YOURSELF.''
So, DIVERGENT starts as a cute and humble cash-in on the trong-female-character-emancipation-in-a-dystopian-setting craze, but it gradually slumps into lazy storytelling and fascistic commentary about drug usage. It's also a ridiculously long movie. You're going to start praying for DIVERGENT to end at about the 80 minutes mark, but it clocks out at a whopping 139 minutes. The society of DIVERGENTcrumbles in a long, painful and not so subtle way. If you were planning to watch movies with your teenager this weekend, instead of suggesting DIVERGENT, let him/her choose the goddamn movie. Maybe you'll be surprise at the choice of your kid's emancipating mind. If he/she choses DIVERGENT anyway, you'll have the perfect scapegoat to blame for having to sit through this long and ridiculous movie. You'll also know that your kid isn't a Divergent (see what I did there?)
