{"id":106,"date":"2016-07-16T20:06:11","date_gmt":"2016-07-17T03:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/?p=106"},"modified":"2017-09-10T16:09:44","modified_gmt":"2017-09-10T22:09:44","slug":"movie-divergent-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/2016\/07\/16\/movie-divergent-2014\/","title":{"rendered":"MOVIE: Divergent (2014)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"https:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/en\/thumb\/d\/d4\/Divergent.jpg\/220px-Divergent.jpg\" alt=\"Divergent\" width=\"220\" height=\"325\" \/><\/strong><strong>Divergent<\/strong><\/span><br \/>\nYear: 2014<br \/>\nRating:\u00a0PG-13<br \/>\nLength: 139\u00a0minutes \/ 2.31\u00a0hours<\/p>\n<p>While <em>The Hunger Games<\/em> really cornered the market in the &#8220;young adult dystopian future&#8221; category, many authors jumped on the bandwagon to cash in on this phenomenon. I&#8217;ll admit that many of these series that got movie adaptations I had never heard of before and likely will not see\/read. The <em>Divergent<\/em> series, though did stand out as the top of &#8220;the rest&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>It can be difficult to create a dystopian world, especially one that&#8217;s at least somewhat set in our current one. The CGI-modified Chicago looks pretty good for a city that&#8217;s been through what it has, but where the computer imagery really comes to shine is in the dream sequences. I would have liked them to be a little more obvious so the audience isn&#8217;t always guessing if it&#8217;s a dream or not, but that&#8217;s part of the charm, I suppose.\u00a0Having since\u00a0read the book this was based on, I do have to say that the director made some good decisions on what areas to cut in order to keep the intent of the book, but at a pace that works better for a film. In fact, the dream sequences were even more difficult to pin down in the book than they were in the movie, so the film did a good job with that.<\/p>\n<p>However, this film still struggles with the &#8220;teenage angst&#8221; that many YA adaptations have. Of course, because of this and the aforementioned CGI, this film does get the feeling like it&#8217;s a mashup of <em>The Hunger Games<\/em> and <em>Avatar: The Last Airbender<\/em>. That being said, the plot and societal structure felt thoroughly thought out and it truly helped distinguish between character archetypes when they are connected to specific colors.<\/p>\n<p>Surprisingly well-developed plot and characters with a good visual feel, I give <em>Divergent<\/em> 4.0\u00a0stars out of 5.<\/p>\n<h1><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/>\u00a0<\/strong><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/>\u00a0<\/strong><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/>\u00a0<\/strong><strong><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-647\" src=\"http:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/255px-Five-pointed_star_svg-150x150.png\" alt=\"255px-Five-pointed_star_svg\" width=\"50\" height=\"50\" \/><\/strong><\/h1>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Divergent Year: 2014 Rating:\u00a0PG-13 Length: 139\u00a0minutes \/ 2.31\u00a0hours While The Hunger Games really cornered the market in the &#8220;young adult dystopian future&#8221; category, many authors jumped on the bandwagon to cash in on this phenomenon. I&#8217;ll admit that many of these series that got movie adaptations I had never heard of before and likely will [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,2],"tags":[26,31,27,13,8,28,29,30],"class_list":["post-106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-4-0-stars","category-movie","tag-26","tag-based-on-a-book","tag-divergent","tag-movie","tag-review","tag-series","tag-trilogy","tag-young-adult"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=106"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":713,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/106\/revisions\/713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/benjamin-m-weilert.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}