Note: I have NOT read the book this movie was based on. What follows is a review of the movie on its own merits.
Divergent presents us with a futuristic speculation: What if society were split into five factions as a way to maintain peace? And what if young adults were given aptitude tests to determine which faction they should call home? And what if someone discovered that she belonged to none of the factions?
This movie was entertaining. I found it to be fast-paced, action-packed, and generally full of crazy people jumping on and off of moving trains. The quality of acting was high and brought a lot to the movie. Shailene Woodley (Tris), brought a lot of feeling to the part. The supporting cast also did a nice job of playing their parts. They owned the story, which helped overcome some of the plausibility issues with the underlying plot. I was able to sit back and enjoy for two hours and twenty minutes.
I never felt like I understood how dividing people into five factions was supposed to ensure peace. I didn’t understand why they only got to choose once. I never understood who the “factionless” were, how they got that way, or what they did. I wasn’t clear on what many of the people within the factions did for a living, especially Abnegation and Candor. What does someone who values honesty or selflessness above anything else DO? They were apparently competing for political superiority, which in my opinion was about the only thing they could do, which sort of undermined the whole system in the first place. Doesn’t anyone go do a regular job… you know like doctoring or teaching or maintenance/repair? Who picks up the trash? Who delivers vegetables to the grocery store? Is this one big commune (because no one seemed to get paid)? And how does it help society to divide and define people by their favorite moral principle?
To be honest, I had trouble imagining how a person could be anything but a divergent, the way it was presented in this movie. I think it would have helped if they’d used mind-altering drugs in the first place. Maybe then, divergents could just be the ones the drugs didn’t work on. But that’s not how it was presented. Instead, divergents simply didn’t fit into one category, given a choice between sefless, honest, intelligent, peaceful, and brave.
I didn’t feel like this story added much to the classic scifi tale Brave New World, in which humans were classified from conceptions. In fact, they were grown in laboratories, their genes pre-selected, to ensure that they were perfect to serve the roles they were designed to serve. They were then raised in institutions, brainwashed from birth to follow the pattern. Divergent poses a similar setup but without establishing (or even suggesting) a plausible means of conquering human nature. In fact, the main character was raised inside a loving nuclear family. Presumably that’s the norm. Most children are supposed to choose to stay in the faction they were born into. but this undermines the idea “faction before blood” which they repeated several times. You can’t just say that. You have to implement it somehow.
The bottom line here is that this movie made for an entertaining Saturday morning at the theater, but it neither contributed to nor successfully challenged other notable stories in the sub-genre of dystopian science fiction.
I remain torn as to whether or not to read the book. My sense is that the issues I have with the movie would hold true in both formats.
Overall, I’d give it a 3 out of 5.