#i say bashing i consider this an entirely fair and accurate judgement

[jupitermelichios]

So we decided we wanted to watch a garbage-fire movie tonight, so we’re watching Divergent and just...

It’s impressive that even with the expectations I had, it somehow manages to be even more soulless than i was braced for. everything about it was so incredibly by-the-numbers it almost looped back around to being interesting, entirely by accident. the incredibly forgetable romance that i literally did forget was happening mulitple times (they have a single substantive conversation, then immediately have sex off screen, then the main character has a nightmare about the dude assaulting her, which is projected onto a tv screen for all her friends to watch, and then they’re just immediately so in love that she’d rather die than live without him. that sounds like an exageration but it’s not, she puts a gun to her own head and threatens to pull the trigger in order to get a +4 power of love charisma buff)

also you know how the hook is that people get assigned to gangs based on their personality type, but she’s special because she has more than one singular personality trait? the way that manifests is the ability to lucid dream. that’s it. that’s her special power. sometimes she also has a greater level of problem solving, but that’s entirely plot dependant, the only reliable power that divergents have is that they can all lucid dream. which is a pretty cool thing to be able to do, but it’s also just like a skill you can learn. apparently in the distopian future no one remembers that.

the thing the movie kept reminding me of was american evangelical prosperity gospel propaganda films, your ‘gods not dead’ and your ‘left behind’. those are generally bad in a very specific way, and they’re bad because the end goal of the film-makers is not to make a good movie, the fact that they’re making a movie at all is almost incidental to their goal. they’re making propaganda, and film just happens to be the medium which is delivering that propaganda. this had the same vibe, i’m assuming because the end-game here was money making and the fact that they were using a movie to do that was an entirely secondary consideration.

also i’m fascinated by the fact that it’s a ‘distopia’ purely in that it’s working with a muted colour palette with stark lighting, and then a handful of scenes are set in an Apple store (and the villain is a woman in a position of power who dresses like Conservative emma frost, because there’s always got to be one of those). there’s no actual distopia, they’ve just dressed the set to look like one. even the stupid faction system seems to be basically working and most people are fine with it.

It took me all of ten minutes of watching the movie to come up with a better premise as well. you keep the faction system, but then you have ‘divergents’ be a special elite class who run everything and then the big reveal is that actually everyone is divergent and no one fits into the boxes but the evil elites pretend they do becausre that makes it easier to enforce the class system. Like, that’s still soulless garbage with nothing of substance to say, but it’s at least thematically coherant garbage, and if anyone asks you can tell them it’s about the use of myers-briggs tests in job applications or the rise in beliefs in horoscopes, something like that. you could definitely fake-deep-ify that no problem. you don’t even really have to change the plot that much, 90% of it could stay the same, just with an actual coherant narrative.

that’s not entirely fair. with the exception of how the fuck abnegation relates to all of this, and how factionless people work (and why the hell the author chose ‘amnity’ for the farmers, instead of, say, diligence) the narrative is pretty coherant, it’s just garbage. soulless cash grabbing garbage.

i hated it intensly and i can’t wait to watch the other two tomorrow to find out how deep the stupid goes and whether they ever do anything meaningful with the lucid dream as a superpower concept.