Divergent

8/17/2014

I should probably mention right away that I have not read the book-trilogy that this movie is based on. Given the content matter I might actually have liked the books. The movie? Well to me the movie was a rather mediocre one. As the blurb states the story is set in a dystopian future but we do not really get to know how they got there except the standard explanation that “there was a war”. The world is a bizarre mixture of primitive post-apocalypse living and modern, futuristic tech. The division of people into factions…well to me it felt pretty dumb to begin with and the idea that some people could not possibly fit into more than one faction was absolutely ludicrous to me. How the hell was it supposed to keep peace by deliberately factioning people against each other? Okay, trying to

2/9/2015

Remedial Dystopia I'm not a big fan of YA lit. Nothing like it when I was young. I grew up with Kesey, Huxley, Salinger, Dickens and The Who. I probably would have liked a steady diet of teen vampires and young dystopians. I would have loved my comic book heroes on the big screen in 3D. And video games and smart phones and search engines. Oh to be a millenial! I was introduced to a truckload of Young Adult Lit during English Ed studies and found myself wanting to read _Catcher in the Rye_ all over again. There was just something really amateurish and disposable about these novellas. Like the authors weren't fully-developed writers. Nor am I all that interested in movies adapted from these novels, unless they are packed with talent (_The Hunger Games_), or star someone I just can't g

10/19/2015

Well, it seems we needed a clone of The Hunger Games because, you know, they give too much money to ignore. Stupid and foreseeable story with the typical action, romance and WTFs moments. Just ignore the whole saga.

8/16/2016

I decided since this was my mother's 75th birthday to check out the first of the 'Divergent' series, since I love Kate Winslet and Ashley Judd, and Neil Burger's earlier 'Limitless' was intriguing and decent for recent sci-fi. Unfortunately the actors playing the main protagonists and the special effects were atrocious, the paper-thin plot was resoundingly predictable and I couldn't wait till it ended. Definitely one Burger that was way overdone. Of course Hollywood garbage like this produces a ton of sequels, while much better and original projects get kicked to the gutter.

6/26/2023

A new world order type of movie. With 5 different factions. It was an ok movie but we only really learn about 2 of the factions really in this movie. What about the other 3. It would have been nice if we could see all 5 factions and how they lived and came about but instead you only know 2. So what's the point of even having the other ones in the movie pointless.

6/9/2024

Ever since I saw him in a UK television drama entitled "Bedlam" (2011) I thought that Theo James ("Number Four") was a man to watch. He was certainly the hook that got me to start watching these adaptations of Veronica Roth's futuristic novels. Well, beauty can only take you so far; the rest has to be down to acting; dialogue etc. and this falls pretty flat on all counts. The premiss is unique - society is divided into five factions based on a perception of virtue. At 16, teenagers have to decide which they have and then they spend their lives living up to the ideals - involving strenuous mental and physical trials. "Tris Prior" (Shailene Woodley") is an exception, however - she doesn't fit into any one category - and so the system has no idea how to cope with this renegade. When she revea