Generic and Forgettable

Rating: 3/10 (26 February 2015)

Though I'm not personally a big YA fan and not exactly what you would call the target audience I did hear a lot of positive feedback about Veronica Roth's movie adaptation of ' Divergent' so decided it was worth a look. I was wrong. The main thing this movie suffers from is too much exposition. Which may make for a clearer and more enjoyable sequel does not make for a good first movie. A lot of the time I had to stifle my groans when yet another ambiguous monologue began to expand upon in a sequel " Our founders built a wall after the big war..." sort of thing. This movie did not bring anything new to the table and instead tried to bring concepts and ideas from older, better movies to a younger audience in the hopes they could attempt to pass it off as original work. Then of course there are the performances. While I don't dispute Shailene Woodley as a competent actress she really didn't shine for me in Divergent. Playing the same unrealistically brave and contemplative teenager who will save the world with special abilities we've seen countless times before. Kate Winslet was somewhat decent, but with such mind numbing material to work with she too did not particularly shine for me. Overall, I'd say give Divergent a miss, trust me you're not missing anything you haven't seen somewhere else.