Divergent

I should probably mention right away that I have not read the book-trilogy that this movie is based on. Given the content matter I might actually have liked the books. The movie? Well to me the movie was a rather mediocre one. As the blurb states the story is set in a dystopian future but we do not really get to know how they got there except the standard explanation that “there was a war”. The world is a bizarre mixture of primitive post-apocalypse living and modern, futuristic tech. The division of people into factions…well to me it felt pretty dumb to begin with and the idea that some people could not possibly fit into more than one faction was absolutely ludicrous to me. How the hell was it supposed to keep peace by deliberately factioning people against each other? Okay, trying to get over these gripes, what about the rest of the movie. Well it was okayish I guess. It did give me the same feeling as when reading a young-adult book and I would say that this movie is most suitable for a younger audience. The story is rather predictable. There is the initial training part where Tris of course gets a few friends and in particular befriends one of her tutors. Not surprisingly th

Remedial Dystopia I'm not a big fan of YA lit. Nothing like it when I was young. I grew up with Kesey, Huxley, Salinger, Dickens and The Who. I probably would have liked a steady diet of teen vampires and young dystopians. I would have loved my comic book heroes on the big screen in 3D. And video games and smart phones and search engines. Oh to be a millenial! I was introduced to a truckload of Young Adult Lit during English Ed studies and found myself wanting to read Catcher in the Rye all over again. There was just something really amateurish and disposable about these novellas. Like the authors weren't fully-developed writers. Nor am I all that interested in movies adapted from these novels, unless they are packed with talent (The Hunger Games), or star someone I just can't get enough of. That someone at the moment is Shailene Woodley. A young woman who is just oozing talent. She has that authentic, subdued strain of self-consciousness, it makes you forget she's in a movie. In fact, her focus seems to come so unassumingly natural I wonder if she even knows she's in a movie. I watched The Fault in Our Stars, The Spectacular Now and Divergent in succession. _Dive

Well, it seems we needed a clone of The Hunger Games because, you know, they give too much money to ignore. Stupid and foreseeable story with the typical action, romance and WTFs moments. Just ignore the whole saga.