Movie Reaction: Divergent

Formula: (The Hunger Games + Ender's Game) / 1984
 

Why I Saw It: Muppets Most Wanted was looking like a box office bust and Shailene Woodley is kind of becoming my new Jennifer Lawrence.

Cast: Shailene Woodley is certainly the biggest selling point in this cast. She carries the movie as the divergent Tris. Jennifer Lawrence never had to work this hard to make Katniss work and it is a credit to Woodley that Tris is as engaging as she is here. Theo James is good playing a guy named Four (Don't make fun of that. He doesn't like when you do). He's sort of the male romantic lead and de facto good guy. He's about as good as you're going to find to play his character. Kate Winslet is not the most interesting character here. She's the head villain and is really just there to do a couple villain things and doesn't have a character beyond that. Ashley Judd and Fitz President Grant Tony Goldwyn are good as Tris' parents. I kind of wish we got more of them. Miles Teller has a small part as one of Tris' training rivals and although he's supposed to be a bad guy, the The Spectacular Now connection made me smile every time I saw him. There's a few other familiar faces as well.

Plot: It's a dystopic world in which people are divided into 5 groups based on generalized personality traits (kind of like the schools at Hogwartz). Tris chooses to join the badass group who like parkour and kicking the shit out of each other instead of the group of selfless, kind person group her family is in (I won't bother giving you the vocab lesson about the lexicon of the movie). In the badass group, Tris has to train hard, sometimes in montage form to survive to the next level (kind of like Katniss does in The Hunger Games). Of course, Tris isn't normal. She's divergent, which basically means she fits in all 5 of society's groups. In short, she's special (kind of like Ender from Ender's Game). There's a big plot by one faction to defeat another faction by using a third faction, presumably while the other factions chill out and watch. Tris is caught in the middle of it and enough shit goes down to warrant a sequel. Wow, that sounded a lot more down on it than I actually am. It's a fun movie...a little long.

Elephant in the Room: How is it different from any other "young adult" book series adaptation"? First of all, there's two categories of these: romance (Twilight, Beautiful Creatures, etc.) and sci-fi/dystopia (Hunger Games, Ender's Game, etc.). This is clearly in the latter, better category. At some point though, when there are so many of these types of movies out there, effective isn't enough. Because, this is an effective movie and if I'd not seen Hunger Games or Ender's Game (or any game-related movie) then I would probably find it a lot more interesting. As it, it's a variation of something familiar, which does it no favors.

To Sum Things Up:
I liked this movie quite a bit. It's the first movie I've seen in several weeks that felt like someone was actually trying. Woodley gives a great lead performance and the overall story looks too have less redundancy than the Hunger Games which is more promising for the sequels (They've already been green lit). While this movie wasn't perfect it is well made and sets things up well for what's to follow.

Verdict (?): Weakly Recommend