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Inspiring. Powerful. Amazing. There are only a few words to describe Divergent. Unfortunately, it isn't those words. Some better words? How about tedious? Boring? Or clique? Yeah those work just fine. Seriously though, I hated this loving movie. The protagonist is a boring girl who can't figure out where she wants to be in life. The setting is a semi-totalitarian city whose regime categorizes most of its citizens into five factions, and leaves the one's who don't fit in with their chosen group on the street homeless or secretly hunts them down. I might have been watching Equilibrium or one of the Hunger Games movies, except that Equilibrium was actually GOOD, and Hunger Games at least didn't try to pull its punches so much for its precious PG-13 rating. 1 star: skip this turd.
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Apr 19, 2014 00:21
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| # ? Apr 27, 2024 00:45 |
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Absolute trash that's full as gently caress with plot holes. I honestly felt like I missed something, like somehow this movie went over my head, so I asked several friends who also saw it. Nobody was able to ever give me a solid answer to any of the concerns I had. I will spoiler a good chunk of this, because most of the major issues I had with the film were the glaring plot holes, so I can't avoid talking about them. Everything else is minor world-building stuff that is revealed in the first 15 minutes. If you really want to avoid anything that could even remotely be a spoiler, skip to after the spoiler block for a tl;dr on my review. First of all, the factionless: At the beginning of the movie it's implied that they're essentially bums, but the willingness of factions to abandon people and make them factionless is hilariously high. The most glaring of these is the Dauntless. We know from Four that the Dauntless have an Intelligence agency, since he's a part of it, but then the first test is to jump off of a train. What happens if you're a really, really smart person with exceptional cyber security skills who could easily fit into an Intelligence agency, but are in a wheel chair? Oops, sorry, homelessness for life for you! Stupid. The test at the beginning of the movie is just loving stupid. So they go through this test in their heads, and are told what faction they are best suited for -- then they get to just ignore their results and pick what they want anyway. The girl giving the test even states that 95% of people just get what they were born into. So then what purpose does the test serve? You could say that it tests for the Divergents, but even that doesn't make sense because the test giver can just manually override the results without alerting anyone. Factions just don't make any sense either. Who works the lovely jobs in this society? We have the military, the scientists, the judicial, the government and the farmers, so who works in, say, retail? Fast food? Sewage? Garbage collection? Toilet cleaning? Also, how does payment for work function in this world? Does everyone get paid the same amount? If better jobs come with better pay and you can pick your faction, why would anyone ever choose to be a farmer/manual laborer when you could just as easily choose to be a scientist or doctor? I am sure this is addressed in the book, but this isn't the book it's the movie, so that isn't a defense. Then, the girl giving the test tells Triss that she's Divergent, but shhh, don't tell anyone else! 99% of the plot in the film would have just been avoided if she didn't tell her she was Divergent. Not only was it just pure, sheer dumb luck that Triss happened to get tested by someone who wouldn't rat her out, but also was stupid enough to tell her what she was without giving any advice whatsoever. I could understand this if she said "you're divergent, that means X, so go see Y", but she just freaks out and says "you're divergent now shut up". This is especially stupid because one of the things she knew Triss might get tested on in the future was her mental stability and fears in a world where mind control and mind reading exist, so why let this happen? So then comes the real problem of the film, where nothing loving happens for another hour and 20 minutes. Literally a majority of the movie is spent with them in various stages of training, which include beating the poo poo out of each other (and of course, every character is a pretty boy or girl and even after weeks of literally beating each other to near death, nobody ever breaks a bone, gets cut, becomes disfigured or even gets a bruise that might look ugly), hanging off of bridges suspended above valleys that will easily kill them, or mentally tortured by being forced to face their worst fears on a daily basis in hallucinations. Then comes the really stupid part of the plot. Four figures out that Triss is divergent because -- wait for it -- she's good at facing her fears. This is literally the only way he's able to tell. When she's in the simulation, she's able to figure out instantly the way to solve her fear of birds (apparently her major, biggest fear is being attacked by birds) is to jump in the water, but this is unacceptable to Four. He tells her that passing the test is only done by divergents and tells her to do it another way; when it comes down to it she figures out that using a flaming stick she found on the ground is okay, but swimming isn't. I'm dead serious and yes, this is as loving stupid as it sounds. If you're smart and still signed up for Dauntless, you're a divergent, period. Remember that this is the faction which controls the intelligence agency for this government. It's also revealed at this point that minds can be read, which just begs the question: why not poke around in her brain and find the part where she's told she's Divergent? Why isn't her being revealed to be Divergent to a boss one of her fears that shows up? Again, remember, at this point she's been told she is divergent and that she should fear anyone finding out, so why isn't she afraid of it? There is no reason why this shouldn't happen. Then, an hour and 45 minutes into the movie, we actually are given the plot: mind control! All of the Dauntless are then injected with a mind control serum that makes them think they are in a perpetual simulation. In this apparent simulation is them taking over the world, which they... willingly do? Okay! And apparently, Divergents are immune to it, which is stupid because we have already seen they aren't. This is a major plot hole. Divergents were affected by the simulation drug in their first test before picking a faction and in the third test if they chose Dauntless, and it worked fine, but now, in stronger, mind controlling doses, it doesn't. It seems odd that the stronger drug would be less powerful but that's how poo poo works. Anyway, now they start weeding out divergents. They find anyone who isn't falling for the mind control and kill them on the spot, because anyone who didn't get controlled is a divergent. Which begs the question: why didn't they just mind control everyone before their training? They're mindless slaves. Couldn't you have trained them in their fighting and shooting skills and skipped the whole five weeks of mental training? Why do they need to be able to face their fears? They're mindless zombies now. They could have skipped all of that and just shot everyone up at the start with the mind control poo poo, killed the divergents before they could make plans, then go from there. Finally, we find out that Four was kidnapped and isn't immune to mind control now. He was before, but now he isn't, and now Triss has to use ~true love~ to break him out of it, which (of course) works perfectly by putting a gun to her own head, and then now he's not mind controlled? I'm just... I can't even begin to explain this. This is a massive plothole. Why was Four immune to it before, but isn't now? And further more, who loving cares? Why didn't they just kill him? So they kill everyone and they take the head honcho woman and inject her with the mind control juice. While everyone else needed to wait a few hours before it took over their brain and then be told what to do by the simluation being controlled, now it magically works instantly and the big bad is under Triss' control and with one command to "shut it down", instantly walks over and shuts down everything, saving the world. It's really, really stupid. So overall Divergent is really lovely. The plot is just absolute garbage and full of holes, while the film itself has massive pacing issues. The movie is 2/3rds over by the time the plot is actually revealed, and every character through the whole thing is just holding multiple idiot balls. It's terrible. 1/5. Don't bother. Maybe if you read the book the gaping plot holes would make sense, but they don't here. AbrahamLincolnLog fucked around with this message at 12:50 on Dec 26, 2014 |
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Dec 26, 2014 12:35
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