I just finished watching Divergent. While I thought some of the action was cool and a few things here or there were clever, as you can probably guess, I really, really hated the plot and characterization. Those of you who enjoyed my Twilight Rant Thread will enjoy this rant, made up from my live-blogged impressions as I watched all 139 minutes of crap.
The 101 Plot Holes in Divergent
Major spoilers for Divergent, minor spoilers for The Hunger Games
1.) In the future, all title screens will rip off Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
2.) The future wall that's supposed to protect everybody does not, in fact, look anything like a wall. So why don't they call it a fence, because it looks like a fence?
3.) The more Chicago decays, the more...it looks exactly the same as before the apocalypse? What the fuck?
4.) "The war was terrible, the rest of the world was destroyed"...but you'll never know any details about said war, because who gives a crap about world building?
5.) Here's a hint, Veronica Roth- using SAT words as the name of your idiotic "factions" does not make you clever.
6.) Lawyers are honest and politicians are selfless in this world?! Don't make me laugh, movie.
7.) Being part of the brave faction means climbing up walls for the hell of it.
8.) If the selfless (and clearly Christian because of the author's beliefs, bordering on Amish) faction was really selfless, they would not allow the "factionless" people to remain homeless and accept them all into Abnegation.
9.) "Protagonist doesn't feel like she belongs in the environment she was raised in" cliche from every dystopian book with a teenage girl ever.
10.) There's an aptitude test telling people which personality trait will define them for the rest of their lives. However, people in this world start out as the faction they're raised in by their parents and 95% test positive for and then choose the faction of their origin anyway after the test anyway. So why not just save some money on pointless tests and work with the parents to brain wash them into that one faction forever? Jeez, this world needs indoctrination lessons from Catholicism!
11.) Also, if you can choose whatever faction you want to be in anyway, regardless of the tests, again, what's the point of the tests?!
12.) The best way to test somebody? Give them a drug that causes them to hallucinate a hall of infinite mirrors, a knife, some meat, and a dog and give them no instructions on how to complete the test!
13.) Yes, it's SO rare for people to have more than one personality trait that you have to use yet another SAT word for it- "Divergent." This is considered Hollywood worthy writing nowadays.
14.) Since Divergent means you don't belong in any one faction, if they consider this a threat, why do they allow the factionless people to exist? Either factionless people aren't really a threat if they can just be homeless and that's it, or the government is a bunch of morons for not killing them all or sending them outside the wall or something. And why do they allow people to choose their own factions? Wouldn't that mean there's a strong possibility that they have more than one personality trait?
15.) Erudite (the smart people) are starting to go up against the Abnegation faction (the selfless, clearly Christian faction). Anybody else see anti-intellectualism there? In a film marketed to impressionable teenagers?
16.) Shailene Woodley can't act her way out of a paper bag.
17.) Ellie Goulding can't sing for her life and yet one of her songs gets randomly thrown in in the first fifteen minutes of the movie.
18.) Apparently, each person picks their faction by cutting their hand with a knife and dripping blood into a bowl full of rocks representing each faction in front of thousands of people. How does this ceremony not go on for three hours?
19.) Wow, I had no idea the main character would choose not to stay with her parent's faction.
20.) Christina is an imitation Rue to Beatrice's carbon copy Katniss.
21.) How does this main character join the brave faction without knowing that they would jump from trains? She followed their exploits as a kid!
22.) Again, being brave doesn't mean stupidly jumping off of stuff without knowing what's at the bottom.
23.) The guy who pulls Beatrice off the giant net thingy at the bottom of the deadly jump is clearly not the designated love interest character.
24.) Tris is an idiotic nickname. Again, people are being paid millions of dollars to write this shit.
25.) Four is an even dumber actual name for giant net guy. Their kids will be mocked until the end of time.
26.) Coed rooms and bathrooms with no privacy will clearly not lead to any problems.
27.) Futuristic rifles look like grey Nerf guns and sound like pea shooters according to people who don't care about proper science fiction weapon design.
28.) Half the dialogue of this movie is people explaining the boring rules of the world that don't make sense.
29.) One of the tattoos that you're allowed to get in Dauntless is of...birds. And not badass ones either, like eagles or falcons. Just regular birds.
30.) Another boring training montage has to take place when we know already that the Mary Sue is the underdog and will become the best, most specialest in whatever she does.
31.) Being a good military instructor means pushing one trainee off of a ledge and forcing them to hang on for dear life, and making another stand in front of targets while knives are thrown at them. Because if there's one thing the military would want, it's to recklessly put their potential soldiers in danger just for disobeying minor regulations.
32.) 10 points to Gryffindor- I mean Dauntless- I mean who the fuck cares because Tris didn't flinch around the throwing knives, which I was SO worried she wasn't going to be able to do.
33.) "People who we know are going to fall in love hate each other at first but will eventually fall in love" cliche from Much Ado About Nothing.
34.) The Erudite woman is clearly the villain. Because women can't be powerful and smart without also being villains.
35.) Tris has to fight the guy who's been a jerk to her and calling her "stiff" (apparently a derogatory name towards Abnegation folks) so that the plot can pretend that she actually has a chance of not getting into Dauntless and becoming factionless when he beats her up in a fight. I called that about thirty minutes before it happened.
36.) After however many minutes of the hardass military instructor being a hardass, he lets Tris on the train to the final test because she's the protagonist.
37.) One of the top guys in the fearless faction is afraid of heights because the plot.
38.) A piece of the ladder up to the Ferris Wheel breaks so that Four can have an excuse to grab Tris's ass.
39.) Being brave doesn't mean being reck...oh, who the fuck I am kidding with this movie's logic?
40.) Tris suddenly knows effective military strategy when the plot needs her to.
41.) The foolproof way to test who will be the best soldiers? Capture the Flag! What is it with this world and dumb, drawn out tests?!
42.) This Capture the Flag game that they play (with bullets that simulate the hurt of being shot without the risk of death, which is actually sorta clever) is totally original and not "inspired" at all by The Hunger Games.
43.) Sorry, asshole guy who beat up Tris earlier, but you get double tapped with two fake gunshots that hurt like real gunshots for being the designated minor antagonist!
44.) In this version of Capture the Flag, all you have to do is touch the enemy flag, not bring it back to your base.
45.) The Dauntless initiators probably only have this elaborate full harness zipline system as a shortcut back to base so the guys have an excuse to feel up the girls.
46.) The zipline system has a brake that you have to reach way behind you blindly to pull while lying on your stomach so that we can have fake tension about whether Tris will die or not.
47.) Tris made it into Dauntless! Again, I was worried there for a second.
48.) Wait a minute, that whole arc was just STAGE ONE of training?! Please, no more...training...so...boring...
49.) Once again with this world and its hallucinatory serums that only work because the plot!
50.) All you have to do to defeat mind-bending hallucination tests is to acknowledge that they aren't real. Which is SO easy to do if you are the rare person that has more than one personality trait.
51.) "Dauntless don't break the glass like that." Because there's only one specific way that every person in Dauntless has to break imaginary glass in a hallucination.
52.) As a Divergent, Tris expects to walk into Erudite (the smart people- just another note so I don't get confused) territory when the obviously evil Erudites want to get rid of all the Divergents just to see her Erudite brother who has clearly been brainwashed by the Erudites? If she wasn't the protagonist, she'd be toast now.
53.) "Speech that lets you know that the villain is very, very bad" cliche, during the conversation between the Erudite leader and Tris.
54.) The smart people want to eradicate human nature because selfless people suck at running the government. Yeah, that makes sense.
55.) What was the point of the conversation between Tris and the villain lady if she's seen the test results and knows that Tris is Divergent? Either the villain is a moron...or she's a Bond villain that make speeches about her evil plan and won't kill Tris now in the middle of Erudite territory because then the movie would (mercifully) end. I'm going with both.
56.) Red lighting now appears in Dauntless out of nowhere to subtly let you know that Tris is in danger upon her return.
57.) "Woman needs to be saved by her love interest because she can't save herself on her own" cliche, since Four saves Tris during the fight where the jerky guy Tris shot during the Capture the Flag game tries to throw her off a cliff with four other guys. I can't believe that was actually a sentence I just wrote.
58.) I swear that twenty minutes of this movie is just Tris being hurt in some way or lying in a hospital bed.
59.) The faction system is clearly stupid if there's the possibility for one faction to overthrow the other and take over the government. It's not like they would, I don't know, equally share power (a la Mutually Assured Destruction) so that this wouldn't happen. I'm sure that just having one totalitarian party control everything wouldn't work at all in an already dystopian state either.
60.) OK, I take back what I said earlier. I'm an hour and a half into a two and a half hour movie now, and at this rate, the training arc is about an hour long and it could end up taking up THE ENTIRE MOVIE.
61.) So, if the Dauntless hallucinatory serum that created the test allows the testers to see exactly how a subject's mind works (stupid, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument), then why oh why does Four think he can get away with helping Tris to hide her test results so that the Dauntless leadership doesn't find out she's Divergent by "going in together" in a practice run of the final test?
62.) Wouldn't the machine just record what was going on through your mind as you tried to fake not being Divergent anyway? Does nobody else have access to these contraptions? Wouldn't they notice if they checked back later and recordings or test results during a practice run were erased or hidden in some way? Why are there no guards or security cameras in the testing area? OK, keep calm...you can get through this movie...
63.) "Brooding male love interest has a tragic backstory" cliche from Twilight.
64.) Four named himself after the four fears that he has. Because that's not unrealistic in Writer Land.
65.) Four got a tattoo on his back so that he would have to be shirtless for Tris to have a reason to touch his back intimately.
66.) In a society where Jedi- I mean Divergents- are hunted by the Empire (let's just call the Erudites what they are at this point), you can get a gigantic tattoo of all five factions because you're an idiot, and the tattoo parlor is never shut down for this.
67.) Wow, I never thought Four and Tris were going to get together. You had me going there for a minute, movie.
68.) Mind control serum exists, and it's based on the science of "stuff pulled out of the author's ass."
69.) Why are there so many fucking serums containing liquid plot devices in this world?! Are they trying to open an apothecary or something?
70.) The evil Erudite lady is watching the final Dauntless test because she's evil.
71.) The final test recycles all the previous hallucinations that Tris practiced already because that makes it so the Mary Sue can know exactly what to do.
72.) The last part of the final hallucination test is fear of an attempted rape by Four because the protagonist is female. And the correct response to being raped, folks? Fight back. Because it's not like he could strangle or stab Tris or something if she was really afraid he'd rape her. (At least, I think that's what was going on. The plot isn't clear exactly, but that's the most logical conclusion from what I saw.)
73.) Again, if the evil Erudite leader lady knows the results of Tris's test, which she would, and knows she's Divergent, which she should, then why would she be fooled into thinking Tris was actually Dauntless?
74.) "Haha, she was actually still dreaming" cliche because Tris thought she woke up and she went into the real final test.
75.) Tris says no when given a direct order to kill somebody when Dauntless are not supposed to refuse orders in the actual last part of the final hallucination test that everyone can see and then pulls the trigger anyway, thus being a complete idiot and giving the villain all the evidence she needs to know that Tris is Divergent if she didn't know by now. If the villain was smarter than a rock, that is.
76.) Mind control serums that are supposed to make all the Dauntless into slaves somehow don't work on people with more than one personality trait. This evil plan is flawless in its execution.
77.) Hmmm...the evil Erudites are using the Dauntless to eliminate Abnegation (who are not at all Christians). That doesn't sound like any Christian persecution narrative I've heard about stretching back to the founding of the religion.
78.) Military instructor you knew was evil all along because he's an asshole...is evil because he's an asshole.
79.) Tris is wounded again.
80.) So instead of preventing Abnegation from destroying the faction system, Erudite decides to fatally unbalance the faction system by eliminating Abnegation? Why do they think that would bring peace instead of just causing the other three factions to rebel?
81.) I get that they're evil, but the Erudites are supposed to at least pretend to have some logic to justify their evil plans. The "bad guys blow up the peaceful people" cliche (other examples include the brutal burning of District 13 in the Hunger Games, or the Galactic Empire blowing up Alderaan with the Death Star) never works in movies! Villains should realize that by now.
82.) Tris's mom is Dauntless all along so that Tris doesn't even come close to getting killed. Again
83.) So, wait, if Tris's mom is really Dauntless and her dad is Abnegation, then does personality in this world get passed on like genes or race? I'm confused.
84.) This movie has turned into Call of Duty: Divergent.
85.) Tris has to kill a redshirt teammate we never cared about in the first place so she can have the prerequisite PTSD without any actual moral conflict or character development taking place.
86.) "The mom dies" cliche from every Disney movie ever. At least she didn't die of easy empathy disease. Oh, wait.
87.) Tris's crying sounds like a piglet getting circumcised with a rusty knife.
88.) Sad music lets you know that you should feel sad now.
89.) Getting into Dauntless to undo the mind control is a suicide mission...for an actual character with flaws.
90.) Tris and the people helping her jump from the train at the end of the movie and to the net at the bottom of the pit just like at the beginning when she joined Dauntless as an easy way for the writers to show her "development" as a character.
91.) Why would the Dauntless leave the net there, and why wouldn't there be at least one or two guards near the easiest way to infiltrate Dauntless (the fort)? Yeah, they refer to the faction headquarters by their faction name without something like "building" or "station" attached to it. Deal with it.
92.) This movie has turned into Splinter Cell: Divergent.
93.) Shooting the jerk you fought with a bunch of times in the arm will make him talk and persuade him to join your side.
94.) Yet another parent falls victim to the plot. Apparently being in Abnegation makes you liable to run out into the open at trained military guys just cause.
95.) Once again, sad music lets you know when you should feel sad.
96.) There are NO GUARDS around the mind control room.
97.) More Bond villain speeches from the evil Erudite lady. Also, she has Four fight Tris instead of having her killed right then and there.
98.) Mind control serum is also defeated by the power of love.
99.) "Evil villain taunting the hero/ine, forcing the hero/ine to make a choice about whether to kill them or not" cliche from every superhero film ever.
100.) "A small band of characters goes on the run from the dictatorship to start the revolution" cliche popularized by, you guessed it, The Hunger Games.
101.) Main characters from a dictatorship escape on a train, which does not in any way shape or form remind me of any other popular young adult series of books that begins with an H. Also, why is there a train to the end of the wall?!
The 101 Plot Holes in Divergent
Major spoilers for Divergent, minor spoilers for The Hunger Games
1.) In the future, all title screens will rip off Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
2.) The future wall that's supposed to protect everybody does not, in fact, look anything like a wall. So why don't they call it a fence, because it looks like a fence?
3.) The more Chicago decays, the more...it looks exactly the same as before the apocalypse? What the fuck?
4.) "The war was terrible, the rest of the world was destroyed"...but you'll never know any details about said war, because who gives a crap about world building?
5.) Here's a hint, Veronica Roth- using SAT words as the name of your idiotic "factions" does not make you clever.
6.) Lawyers are honest and politicians are selfless in this world?! Don't make me laugh, movie.
7.) Being part of the brave faction means climbing up walls for the hell of it.
8.) If the selfless (and clearly Christian because of the author's beliefs, bordering on Amish) faction was really selfless, they would not allow the "factionless" people to remain homeless and accept them all into Abnegation.
9.) "Protagonist doesn't feel like she belongs in the environment she was raised in" cliche from every dystopian book with a teenage girl ever.
10.) There's an aptitude test telling people which personality trait will define them for the rest of their lives. However, people in this world start out as the faction they're raised in by their parents and 95% test positive for and then choose the faction of their origin anyway after the test anyway. So why not just save some money on pointless tests and work with the parents to brain wash them into that one faction forever? Jeez, this world needs indoctrination lessons from Catholicism!
11.) Also, if you can choose whatever faction you want to be in anyway, regardless of the tests, again, what's the point of the tests?!
12.) The best way to test somebody? Give them a drug that causes them to hallucinate a hall of infinite mirrors, a knife, some meat, and a dog and give them no instructions on how to complete the test!
13.) Yes, it's SO rare for people to have more than one personality trait that you have to use yet another SAT word for it- "Divergent." This is considered Hollywood worthy writing nowadays.
14.) Since Divergent means you don't belong in any one faction, if they consider this a threat, why do they allow the factionless people to exist? Either factionless people aren't really a threat if they can just be homeless and that's it, or the government is a bunch of morons for not killing them all or sending them outside the wall or something. And why do they allow people to choose their own factions? Wouldn't that mean there's a strong possibility that they have more than one personality trait?
15.) Erudite (the smart people) are starting to go up against the Abnegation faction (the selfless, clearly Christian faction). Anybody else see anti-intellectualism there? In a film marketed to impressionable teenagers?
16.) Shailene Woodley can't act her way out of a paper bag.
17.) Ellie Goulding can't sing for her life and yet one of her songs gets randomly thrown in in the first fifteen minutes of the movie.
18.) Apparently, each person picks their faction by cutting their hand with a knife and dripping blood into a bowl full of rocks representing each faction in front of thousands of people. How does this ceremony not go on for three hours?
19.) Wow, I had no idea the main character would choose not to stay with her parent's faction.
20.) Christina is an imitation Rue to Beatrice's carbon copy Katniss.
21.) How does this main character join the brave faction without knowing that they would jump from trains? She followed their exploits as a kid!
22.) Again, being brave doesn't mean stupidly jumping off of stuff without knowing what's at the bottom.
23.) The guy who pulls Beatrice off the giant net thingy at the bottom of the deadly jump is clearly not the designated love interest character.
24.) Tris is an idiotic nickname. Again, people are being paid millions of dollars to write this shit.
25.) Four is an even dumber actual name for giant net guy. Their kids will be mocked until the end of time.
26.) Coed rooms and bathrooms with no privacy will clearly not lead to any problems.
27.) Futuristic rifles look like grey Nerf guns and sound like pea shooters according to people who don't care about proper science fiction weapon design.
28.) Half the dialogue of this movie is people explaining the boring rules of the world that don't make sense.
29.) One of the tattoos that you're allowed to get in Dauntless is of...birds. And not badass ones either, like eagles or falcons. Just regular birds.
30.) Another boring training montage has to take place when we know already that the Mary Sue is the underdog and will become the best, most specialest in whatever she does.
31.) Being a good military instructor means pushing one trainee off of a ledge and forcing them to hang on for dear life, and making another stand in front of targets while knives are thrown at them. Because if there's one thing the military would want, it's to recklessly put their potential soldiers in danger just for disobeying minor regulations.
32.) 10 points to Gryffindor- I mean Dauntless- I mean who the fuck cares because Tris didn't flinch around the throwing knives, which I was SO worried she wasn't going to be able to do.
33.) "People who we know are going to fall in love hate each other at first but will eventually fall in love" cliche from Much Ado About Nothing.
34.) The Erudite woman is clearly the villain. Because women can't be powerful and smart without also being villains.
35.) Tris has to fight the guy who's been a jerk to her and calling her "stiff" (apparently a derogatory name towards Abnegation folks) so that the plot can pretend that she actually has a chance of not getting into Dauntless and becoming factionless when he beats her up in a fight. I called that about thirty minutes before it happened.
36.) After however many minutes of the hardass military instructor being a hardass, he lets Tris on the train to the final test because she's the protagonist.
37.) One of the top guys in the fearless faction is afraid of heights because the plot.
38.) A piece of the ladder up to the Ferris Wheel breaks so that Four can have an excuse to grab Tris's ass.
39.) Being brave doesn't mean being reck...oh, who the fuck I am kidding with this movie's logic?
40.) Tris suddenly knows effective military strategy when the plot needs her to.
41.) The foolproof way to test who will be the best soldiers? Capture the Flag! What is it with this world and dumb, drawn out tests?!
42.) This Capture the Flag game that they play (with bullets that simulate the hurt of being shot without the risk of death, which is actually sorta clever) is totally original and not "inspired" at all by The Hunger Games.
43.) Sorry, asshole guy who beat up Tris earlier, but you get double tapped with two fake gunshots that hurt like real gunshots for being the designated minor antagonist!
44.) In this version of Capture the Flag, all you have to do is touch the enemy flag, not bring it back to your base.
45.) The Dauntless initiators probably only have this elaborate full harness zipline system as a shortcut back to base so the guys have an excuse to feel up the girls.
46.) The zipline system has a brake that you have to reach way behind you blindly to pull while lying on your stomach so that we can have fake tension about whether Tris will die or not.
47.) Tris made it into Dauntless! Again, I was worried there for a second.
48.) Wait a minute, that whole arc was just STAGE ONE of training?! Please, no more...training...so...boring...
49.) Once again with this world and its hallucinatory serums that only work because the plot!
50.) All you have to do to defeat mind-bending hallucination tests is to acknowledge that they aren't real. Which is SO easy to do if you are the rare person that has more than one personality trait.
51.) "Dauntless don't break the glass like that." Because there's only one specific way that every person in Dauntless has to break imaginary glass in a hallucination.
52.) As a Divergent, Tris expects to walk into Erudite (the smart people- just another note so I don't get confused) territory when the obviously evil Erudites want to get rid of all the Divergents just to see her Erudite brother who has clearly been brainwashed by the Erudites? If she wasn't the protagonist, she'd be toast now.
53.) "Speech that lets you know that the villain is very, very bad" cliche, during the conversation between the Erudite leader and Tris.
54.) The smart people want to eradicate human nature because selfless people suck at running the government. Yeah, that makes sense.
55.) What was the point of the conversation between Tris and the villain lady if she's seen the test results and knows that Tris is Divergent? Either the villain is a moron...or she's a Bond villain that make speeches about her evil plan and won't kill Tris now in the middle of Erudite territory because then the movie would (mercifully) end. I'm going with both.
56.) Red lighting now appears in Dauntless out of nowhere to subtly let you know that Tris is in danger upon her return.
57.) "Woman needs to be saved by her love interest because she can't save herself on her own" cliche, since Four saves Tris during the fight where the jerky guy Tris shot during the Capture the Flag game tries to throw her off a cliff with four other guys. I can't believe that was actually a sentence I just wrote.
58.) I swear that twenty minutes of this movie is just Tris being hurt in some way or lying in a hospital bed.
59.) The faction system is clearly stupid if there's the possibility for one faction to overthrow the other and take over the government. It's not like they would, I don't know, equally share power (a la Mutually Assured Destruction) so that this wouldn't happen. I'm sure that just having one totalitarian party control everything wouldn't work at all in an already dystopian state either.
60.) OK, I take back what I said earlier. I'm an hour and a half into a two and a half hour movie now, and at this rate, the training arc is about an hour long and it could end up taking up THE ENTIRE MOVIE.
61.) So, if the Dauntless hallucinatory serum that created the test allows the testers to see exactly how a subject's mind works (stupid, but I'll grant it for the sake of argument), then why oh why does Four think he can get away with helping Tris to hide her test results so that the Dauntless leadership doesn't find out she's Divergent by "going in together" in a practice run of the final test?
62.) Wouldn't the machine just record what was going on through your mind as you tried to fake not being Divergent anyway? Does nobody else have access to these contraptions? Wouldn't they notice if they checked back later and recordings or test results during a practice run were erased or hidden in some way? Why are there no guards or security cameras in the testing area? OK, keep calm...you can get through this movie...
63.) "Brooding male love interest has a tragic backstory" cliche from Twilight.
64.) Four named himself after the four fears that he has. Because that's not unrealistic in Writer Land.
65.) Four got a tattoo on his back so that he would have to be shirtless for Tris to have a reason to touch his back intimately.
66.) In a society where Jedi- I mean Divergents- are hunted by the Empire (let's just call the Erudites what they are at this point), you can get a gigantic tattoo of all five factions because you're an idiot, and the tattoo parlor is never shut down for this.
67.) Wow, I never thought Four and Tris were going to get together. You had me going there for a minute, movie.
68.) Mind control serum exists, and it's based on the science of "stuff pulled out of the author's ass."
69.) Why are there so many fucking serums containing liquid plot devices in this world?! Are they trying to open an apothecary or something?
70.) The evil Erudite lady is watching the final Dauntless test because she's evil.
71.) The final test recycles all the previous hallucinations that Tris practiced already because that makes it so the Mary Sue can know exactly what to do.
72.) The last part of the final hallucination test is fear of an attempted rape by Four because the protagonist is female. And the correct response to being raped, folks? Fight back. Because it's not like he could strangle or stab Tris or something if she was really afraid he'd rape her. (At least, I think that's what was going on. The plot isn't clear exactly, but that's the most logical conclusion from what I saw.)
73.) Again, if the evil Erudite leader lady knows the results of Tris's test, which she would, and knows she's Divergent, which she should, then why would she be fooled into thinking Tris was actually Dauntless?
74.) "Haha, she was actually still dreaming" cliche because Tris thought she woke up and she went into the real final test.
75.) Tris says no when given a direct order to kill somebody when Dauntless are not supposed to refuse orders in the actual last part of the final hallucination test that everyone can see and then pulls the trigger anyway, thus being a complete idiot and giving the villain all the evidence she needs to know that Tris is Divergent if she didn't know by now. If the villain was smarter than a rock, that is.
76.) Mind control serums that are supposed to make all the Dauntless into slaves somehow don't work on people with more than one personality trait. This evil plan is flawless in its execution.
77.) Hmmm...the evil Erudites are using the Dauntless to eliminate Abnegation (who are not at all Christians). That doesn't sound like any Christian persecution narrative I've heard about stretching back to the founding of the religion.
78.) Military instructor you knew was evil all along because he's an asshole...is evil because he's an asshole.
79.) Tris is wounded again.
80.) So instead of preventing Abnegation from destroying the faction system, Erudite decides to fatally unbalance the faction system by eliminating Abnegation? Why do they think that would bring peace instead of just causing the other three factions to rebel?
81.) I get that they're evil, but the Erudites are supposed to at least pretend to have some logic to justify their evil plans. The "bad guys blow up the peaceful people" cliche (other examples include the brutal burning of District 13 in the Hunger Games, or the Galactic Empire blowing up Alderaan with the Death Star) never works in movies! Villains should realize that by now.
82.) Tris's mom is Dauntless all along so that Tris doesn't even come close to getting killed. Again
83.) So, wait, if Tris's mom is really Dauntless and her dad is Abnegation, then does personality in this world get passed on like genes or race? I'm confused.
84.) This movie has turned into Call of Duty: Divergent.
85.) Tris has to kill a redshirt teammate we never cared about in the first place so she can have the prerequisite PTSD without any actual moral conflict or character development taking place.
86.) "The mom dies" cliche from every Disney movie ever. At least she didn't die of easy empathy disease. Oh, wait.
87.) Tris's crying sounds like a piglet getting circumcised with a rusty knife.
88.) Sad music lets you know that you should feel sad now.
89.) Getting into Dauntless to undo the mind control is a suicide mission...for an actual character with flaws.
90.) Tris and the people helping her jump from the train at the end of the movie and to the net at the bottom of the pit just like at the beginning when she joined Dauntless as an easy way for the writers to show her "development" as a character.
91.) Why would the Dauntless leave the net there, and why wouldn't there be at least one or two guards near the easiest way to infiltrate Dauntless (the fort)? Yeah, they refer to the faction headquarters by their faction name without something like "building" or "station" attached to it. Deal with it.
92.) This movie has turned into Splinter Cell: Divergent.
93.) Shooting the jerk you fought with a bunch of times in the arm will make him talk and persuade him to join your side.
94.) Yet another parent falls victim to the plot. Apparently being in Abnegation makes you liable to run out into the open at trained military guys just cause.
95.) Once again, sad music lets you know when you should feel sad.
96.) There are NO GUARDS around the mind control room.
97.) More Bond villain speeches from the evil Erudite lady. Also, she has Four fight Tris instead of having her killed right then and there.
98.) Mind control serum is also defeated by the power of love.
99.) "Evil villain taunting the hero/ine, forcing the hero/ine to make a choice about whether to kill them or not" cliche from every superhero film ever.
100.) "A small band of characters goes on the run from the dictatorship to start the revolution" cliche popularized by, you guessed it, The Hunger Games.
101.) Main characters from a dictatorship escape on a train, which does not in any way shape or form remind me of any other popular young adult series of books that begins with an H. Also, why is there a train to the end of the wall?!
Luke: You don't believe in the Force, do you?
Han Solo: Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen *anything* to make me believe that there's one all-powerful Force controlling everything. 'Cause no mystical energy field controls *my* destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
Han Solo: Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other, and I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen *anything* to make me believe that there's one all-powerful Force controlling everything. 'Cause no mystical energy field controls *my* destiny. It's all a lot of simple tricks and nonsense.
