Completely disappointing for a huge fan of the book.

Rating: 6/10 (6 September 2014)

First off, let me just say that I'm not sure if what I'm about to write are spoilers but I marked it as such just in case so read at your own risk. *Note: I'm 99% sure I didn't include spoilers, but still read at your own risk.*
Alright, so when I saw this movie poster I really wanted to see it because it looked like sci-fi and I thoroughly enjoy sci-fis. But then I found out it was a book first so, I wanted to read the book before watching the movie. I believe that the book is always better than the movie. Sometimes the book and the movie are equally great. Unfortunately, this movie was not good.
I never saw the trailer for this movie so, I decided to watch it before watching the movie just as a refresher. After watching the trailer, I could tell right away that the book would be 100x better. Usually trailers are already not as good as the actually movie, but somehow I could tell that the movie Divergent would not be as great as the book.
The actress from My Secret Life as an American Teenager (who plays the teen mom) totally catches you off guard if you were a huge fan of the show. If you've seen enough episodes you will know that the character (played by Shailene Woodley) is kind of whiny and pretty selfish. You're kind of stuck between being highly annoyed with her and feeling sorry for her and kind of liking her. So when I saw that she was playing Tris (in Divergent) it made me skeptical. But then I remembered the strong qualities of the teen mom character and thought maybe it won't be so bad.
Well it wasn't so bad, Shailene Woodley played a pretty convincing Tris in Divergent even her crying scenes. I think those were the best because she's such a good crier. What I didn't like was that they cut out a lot of important parts and they switched the story around; some things happened before or after they were supposed to happen. A lot of the character development and friendship developments were cut out, and those were two of the most important things. How are you supposed to know what happened or why it happened if you have no sense of who the characters are? I was pretty much convinced by the end of the movie that the reason there's no character development is because they did have a lot of things to include, and already it took 2+ hours to get them in; so, if they added more then the movie would be longer.
To be honest I wouldn't have minded a longer movie. It might as well have been longer because it felt so short. I don't know if it's because I read the book before so I knew every single detail that was missed and everything that was changed, but I felt lost. I felt really disappointed that there were little to none important scenes. People who never read the book are left with a lot of questions and many are left disliking it altogether.
I encourage you to read the book before watching the movie. Not just because it is so much better than the movie, but because you won't feel lost and you will know how the story goes.
The only reason I rated this movie so high is because even though they changed the ending, I still enjoyed how they changed it. Also, I really liked the setting of the Divergent headquarters, the train, the technology used and some of the faction uniforms.