I liked the trains. I hope in the sequel we get to see one stop at a station.

Rating: 5/10 (4 August 2014)

Divergent is a pretty movie. The CGI of post-apocalyptic Chicago is very nice, but the plot has too many holes which keep breaking the suspension of disbelief. The underlying premise had potential but is not explored. Instead we spend most of the movie being bored in The Pit and screaming "You Idiot!" at the film's heroine.
First, lets get the comparison to Hunger Games out of the way: Yes. Divergent is a rip-off of Hunger Games, but Hunger Games is itself a rip-off of Battle Royale. At least Hunger Games is entertaining. Divergent is kind of dull.
Divergent is YA fiction. I'm not it's target audience. Perhaps that is why Shailene Woodley's Tris doesn't do it for me. I don't identify with her character, and she does so many stupid things I can't root for her either. I know she can act, but her performance here is flat.
Tris is a whiny teen. Worse, a whiny teen who kept on doing stupid things. When a terrified Tori (Maggie Q) tells her to shut up about being divergent, she doesn't take the hint. When Kate Winslet's Jeanine told her she knew her tests results, instead of bluffing she blurts out 'You know I'm divergent? Wow! I am so dead!' (Not her exact words, but close...) And when she fights, she doesn't fight back and gets K.O.ed.
The movie is filled with moments like this which had me screaming "You idiot!"
The faction system is criticized as unworkable but that's okay because it's a valid premise that hundred year-old oligarchs dreamed up a political system that doesn't work and it takes a while for that to be recognized. But its problems are immediately obvious to the viewer.
Any system which divides people into factions, each with different privileges, is bound to cause envy. There's open tension between the groups. We see a Candor (lawyer) openly accusing Abnegation (cleric politician) of stealing. Erudite's (intelligstia's) campaign to overthrow Abnegation is well known. If it's a perfect society, why do they need Dauntless (paramilitary) to keep the peace or candor (lawyers) to resolve disputes? And what about the large numbers of factionless living like the homeless, instead of moving into the many abandoned buildings around the city? And any American who sees that only one faction has the right to bears arms will raise an eyebrow. And who does the cleaning and chauffeuring?
These problems supposedly are in the source material, but the movies writers should have patched those up.
Too much of the movie is spent in "The Pit" of the Dauntless faction. When we first saw Dauntless they looked like an interesting crowd: happy paramilitaries who jump, leap and somersault and are generally in a good mood. If utopia must have a police force, these would be a good choice. But once we get inside, they're just another soulless army.
Now if Dauntless had been the jumping, leaping, somersaulting Stomp-boys we saw at the beginning, Tris' journey could have made an interesting story.
In boot camp there are five guys who looked so similar I couldn't tell them apart.
The on-screen action is poorly directed. Teenage girls might not pick this up, but the teenage boys raised on first-person shooter games forced to watch this movie with them will: Gun battles consist of standing in the open and shooting. No teamwork or cover. Tris' Mom comes to get her alone: rookie mistake. And when her Dad attacks some bad guys instead of using cover, he walks to them shooting and gets shot himself. That's not a noble death. When you're only five and they're hundreds, fighting by attrition is stupid. And even though her Mom is supposedly a crack ex-Dauntless soldier, she also fights and dies stupid. When Tris flees, she hides with her back to a glass door facing the street. Imagine every gamer in the audience by reflex hitting the imaginary fire button on their cinema seat...
Particularly grating is one action scene where a drugged fellow recruit stumbles towards her shooting... Tris keeps calling for him to stop, and he keeps shooting... and missing at point blank. Eventually she shoots him. But really, she should be dead. This is really bad direction from Neil Burger who bought us the fantastic "Limitless." (What happened, man?)
Most grating of all are the end scenes. While the Dauntless prepare to execute the Abnegation faction Holocaust-style, Tris keeps looking around like a wide-eyed idiot. And then having beaten the Erudites, instead of pushing the advantage, she turns tail and runs. When Jeanine wakes up she'll finish what she started. And if the Dauntless infantry would now refuse that order, why leave now and give the Dauntless leadership the opportunity to reassert control?
It was the biggest of all the plot holes, and it's these which killed this movie.
I liked Theo James as Four, but Shailene Woodley just wasn't right for the role. The film's production poster, emphasizing her butt, is unintentionally comical.
The plot holes could have been fixed, if the movie producers had been brave enough to "diverge" from the book. But for unfathomable reasons the book series is popular. Why mess with a working formula? They made a dumb movie from a dumb book. Sequels are assured. They will make a lot of money out of this. The studios got their wish. The fans got their wish. And the rest of us will watch it anyway, just to see how it ends.
The soundtrack is VH1 weak. Hans Zimmer is "Executive Composer," whatever that means.
The romance is cheesy and not convincing.
The real crime here is with a better director, better screen writers and better casting, this could have been a classic.