Extremely Disappointing

Rating: 5/10 (15 September 2015)

I have to be honest. I was extremely disappointed with this movie. I have been a lifelong Potter fan, enjoyed Twilight (the books are way better than the movies) and loved The Hunger Games. I like Science Fiction even though many of these books were written for teens and I'm in my 20s. Regardless, I wanted to give the Divergent series a chance and my next read will be The Maze Runner.
First of all, the movie was SO not faithful to the book. If I had never read the book, I would have liked the movie more, but it was so horribly inaccurate. I found myself saying "No," "That never happens," "WHAT?!" "What about...?" to almost everything. I'm kind of shocked that the author approved this movie. Entire scenes and characters were left out. This book was shorter than most of the Harry Potter books and the directors of those movies seemed to fit everything in nicely, so I wouldn't use that as an excuse!
Second of all, the characters needed to be expressed more so. Peter isn't mean enough, Jeanine isn't evil enough, Four isn't edgy enough (and he looks a lot older than 18, but I digress), etc. I did appreciate Eric though. I think they did a great job with his character.
There wasn't much for back story either. I don't expect a movie to go into extraneous detail since that's what the books usually do, but there was practically no detail. I found myself explaining things to my boyfriend while we were watching that way he would know why things were happening.
I don't know what else to say. It just wasn't a good movie because it's like they hardly read the book themselves. If I were about to direct a movie based on a best-selling book, I sure would be studying the book cover to cover.