Divergent: proof that not all books should be made into movies

If you are anything like me, when you watch a movie that is based on a book you like, you hope and pray that the filmmakers will stay as true to the book as possible.  Unfortunately for Divergent this is exactly what they did.

While I thought the concept of the book was pretty good I felt that overall it fell flat.  The characters start off very underdeveloped, the background is really vague, and there is a general lack of emotion.  However, as the book reached the halfway mark it did start to pick up a bit and turned out to be not too bad. Certainly not the best I’ve read, but also not the worst.  When I finally got around to seeing the movie version I didn’t really have high hopes for it, but I thought that if the filmmakers were able to visually show some more depth to the main character, Tris, that was really lacking in the book, then it would end up being more enjoyable.  But for the first time that I can remember, a director stayed so true to the original story that it transferred all of the books flaws onto the big screen.

The general idea of the story is that it is a futuristic society that has survived…something.  This something is never explained but whatever it was tore the world apart, forcing the survivors to break society into factions based upon their personal traits. These traits become their religion, political views, and lifestyles all rolled into one. They live and die by them. They each have cool names but they basically boil down to bravery, knowledge, honesty, peaceful, and selfless. When a child turns 16 they are tested to see, psychologically, which faction they should join, and on the following day they choose which faction they will be in for the rest of their lives. If they do not pass initiation (though not all factions have pass or fail standards), or for some reason fail to choose, then they will become faction-less, which is basically the poor, underclass of the society.

Our protagonist, Beatrice (later "Tris"), tests as being Divergent, meaning that she did not fall into a single category but rather three. Because you are supposed to be all or nothing for just one faction, this is a bad thing. The only thing this adds to the beginning of the story is to put pressure on Beatrice because she wanted the test to tell her who she is definitively.  Since it doesn’t, this causes a lot of anxiety for her that lasts about 23 seconds and then she joins the brave faction "Divergent".  She is warned however that she cannot let anyone find out that she is Divergent because it’s dangerous... or icky, maybe contagious… I don’t know, it’s just supposed to be bad, but they are really vague.  The rest of the story centers around her trying to fit into the new faction, avoid failing initiation, and trying hard not to fall in love.  I won’t go into too much detail because, spoilers.

The biggest problem with the story is the complete lack of emotion.  Tris (Beatrice changes her name when she joins her new faction), is completely void of character in the beginning and then transitions to a brave alpha persona with literally no events that cause the change.  Eventually they do add plot devices to make her grow and change but it’s too little too late because, even though she grows, she remains rather bland.  At one point she is forced to face her biggest fears, and she just kind of shrugs them off as if she was more mildly irritated by them.  What is worse is that it spreads to every other character. Each consecutive character is just as bland as the next, with the exception of, maybe, her mother played by Ashley Judd, but she is given so little screen time it doesn’t matter.

The story itself also becomes pretty ridiculous at times. For example, when you first get to your faction you can choose a new name for yourself.  Later, at the end of initiation, you will learn how many fears you have.  But there is one character whose name is the number of fears he has, Four. How did  he already know how many fears he had at the beginning of initiation? Who knows. There are tons of things like this. What happened that caused the world to be like this? Why does everyone conform to it yet being Divergent is abnormal? How does Tris become an expert marksman just because someone makes a joke about her being a bad shot? And non of these are ever answered.

Overall, I can’t really recommend this movie unless you are either a massive sci-fi fan, a tween with an obsession for the series, or you’re bored and the copy was free. It’s not a truly bad movie, it’s just not special in anyway.