movies: divergent

It seems like there's one sure way to get a movie made these days...write a three book series for young adults, specifically aimed at young women, and if possible, set it in some sort of dystopian future... and throw a female everyman character in there, and a somewhat brooding love interest, and there you are.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Divergent!

It's not as derivative as I was possibly expecting it to be... and to be honest I did find the world that the characters inhabit to be an interesting one. Although I'll be honest, I got confused about which Factions were which after the first five minutes of the movie and couldn't remember which one of the folks in blue belonged to.

Which is a little embarrassing since the faction in question is Erudite, which values intelligence, and is also the one that I got in two different online quizzes.

And at 139 minutes, the movie does feel a little bit long. More so in the last third, where I just wanted it to get moving along to the end.

The cast is mostly faces I didn't recognise (or who I didn't realise had been in things I'd seen until afterwards), although Kate Winslet is brilliant as the movie's villain (which would be a spoiler, if not for the fact that it's clear she just has to be up to no good from the first moment you meet her).

But I spent the majority of the movie just wishing that they would just cut Shailene Woodley's hair. I will say that I didn't especially like Woodley's Tris all that much. There wasn't anything specific that she did or didn't do, she just seemed far too generic somehow (and Woodley is no Jennifer Lawrence).

Somehow Theo James felt like he'd gotten lost and wandered in from one of those CW Network shows with a brooding young man who falls for the heroine, and there's always a lot of popular music in the soundtrack. Not that he's ever been in one of those shows, he just has that look.

And while Ma commented after the movie was over that James was all attractive and brooding, personally I much preferred Jai Courtney with his futuristic piercings and neck tattoo, even though he pretty much plays a douche for the whole movie.

So while I'm not sure I'm especially bothered about dipping back into the world for the next three movies (because it wouldn't be a modern adaptation of a book trilogy if you didn't split the last book into two movies), but it was an interesting visit.

yani's rating: 2 aptitude tests out of 5