By all accounts Divergent should have been a good movie. It has interesting actors, and Oscar winner playing the villain and a decent director. Unfortunately, this movie doesn’t manage to translate its wonderful source material to the screen with any kind of aplomb.
Divergent, for folks not in the know, tells the story of the world after a war. Set in dystopian Chicago, society is divided into five factions: Abnegation (Selfless), Candor (truth), Eriudite (Intelligent), Amity (Kindness), and Dauntless (brave) and each faction fulfills a specific role in society. In order to determine what faction people are in, at a certain age all young people take a test. Beatrice Prior (Shailene Woodley) is one such person. However, her test results are inconclusive, meaning that she is divergent and will have a target on her back. After choosing to leave her faction for Dauntless, she learns the danger her divergence could put her in and what she must do in order to stop a corrupt government from upending society.
There are many things to talk about with Divergent, and many of them not good. My biggest problem with this film is that for all of it’s dystopian trappings and revolutionary actions, Divergent just felt so blah. On the way home from seeing the movie, I thought to myself that maybe I unfairly maligned first entries of both The Hunger Games and the Twilight franchise. Twilight especially was present in my mind as a movie based on subpar material that didn’t manage to be very good, but at least had Catherine Hardwick trying interesting things and the cast trying to find their characters. In the hands of Neil Burger and incompetent visual effects team (seriously, they were subpar for a big franchise film), this film just lays on the screen, no kind of visual energy or filmmaking voice. Where was the soul? The joie de vivre? Divergent has so many sequences that should have flown off the screen. Tris soaring through the skyscrapers, the Dauntless home base, the Ferris Wheel scene…and yet none of these felt like more than just scenes in a movie because of how cookie cutter the direction and set design was. Even when Burger tries to ramp the film up visually, such as panning the camera during individual shots of a conversation with Tris and Jeanine Prior, reveals itself to be more asinine than astute. It’s mind boggling that a movie, in IMAX no less, managed to feel so plain but Burger does it.
This really hurt the performances the most. Theo James, who hails from the Sam Claflin school of looking pretty but having the screen presence of a sheet of paper, is really undone by the lack of energy in the film. Having read the books, I understood that this character was walled up but just because you’re walled up doesn’t mean having no emotion. I don’t know whether to blame Burger or James, but this performance came off so flat to me. Same thing with Miles Teller as Peter, who though evil just felt really one note (not for nothing the script doesn’t include his most dastardly deed).
A positive note, I must say that I thought Shailene Woodley was perfect for Tris and gives a pretty good performance. It’s just too bad the film around her doesn’t step its game up to her level.
Grade: **/**** (D+)