*SPOILERS*

On March 20th, I went and saw the highly anticipated “Insurgent.” For someone who hasn’t read the books, they would think this movie is really good, because they wouldn’t know what was supposed to happen. However, for a book-to-movie adaptation, I wasn’t impressed. I happen to be a big fan of the “Divergent” Trilogy and couldn’t help but compare this movie to the book. I felt this movie was very rushed and not a lot of care went into the script.

First I’ll talk about a couple of things I did like. Towards the beginning of the film, the train scene with Tris, Four, and Caleb running from Dauntless soldiers and fighting some Factionless, was very action-packed and gave me the same rush I got from Tris running for the train, for the very first time, in “Divergent.” I also really enjoyed Peter in this movie. He was hilarious and stole every scene he was in.

The main thing I disliked about the film was the technology they threw in it. Reading the books, I always thought that it was realistic and that being split into factions could totally be a thing in the future, but the technology in the movie made it feel so unrealistic. All the crazy gismos and gadgets in the movie were not in the books! Of course it’s a futuristic trilogy, but the world is not filled with these high technological things. I really had a problem with the face scanner, that could scan someone’s face and tell what faction they are in and their divergent percentage. To me, this makes absolutely no sense. If someone can choose which faction they want to be in, a scanner wouldn’t be able to tell what faction they’re in, because that person can choose any faction they want, even if they don’t really belong there. Another thing I didn’t like in the movie, was the fact that they dismissed the importance of Tris’s emotional state. In the book “Insurgent,” Tris hates herself for killing Will and is dealing with the fact that both of her parents are dead. All this is causing Tris and Four to grow distant from each other because of all that she is keeping inside. This all had so much importance in the book, so seeing it underdeveloped was very disappointing. I also couldn’t help but notice that they left out some great characters from the book. The particular scene where the controlled suicides happen was flat out ridiculous. In the book, it happens on the roof of a building with no one but Tris and Christina there to see it, making it an intense and scary moment. In the movie, they made it to where the people being controlled by the serum were standing off a ledge, inside the Dauntless compound, with over fifty people standing below watching it unfold. Why couldn’t everyone just shuffle forward and hold out their arms to catch the people when they fell? No, instead, everyone, besides Tris and someone else, just decide to stand there and watch one of the people fall splat on the ground, literally five feet in front of them. Another big thing in the movie that I didn’t like was the box. This box was not at all in the book, which is okay, but the way they executed the box felt unrealistic. If the box is from the past, how did they know they would need to build this machine to hook up to the divergents and have this wireless connection to the box? Lastly, a minor thing in the movie that bothered me a bit was Four’s mom. She looked like she was Four’s sister. I will end saying that the movie didn’t exceed my expectations. Overall, I felt the movie was very disjointed and that it didn’t flow together.