While on spring break, I reread the entire Divergent series and watched the first two movies in order to prepare myself for the third installment of the movies.
I love the trilogy, and was impressed with the first two movies. There were some slight changes, but they weren’t major enough to be upset over.
Warning: if you haven’t seen the movie and are planning to, you might want to stop reading now. I may spoil some things for you.
Allegiant was a different story. I was extremely upset with how far-fetched the movie was. Everything beyond the wall was completely different than how Veronica Roth described in her novels. In the novels, beyond the wall were ruins filled with trees and overgrown weeds. In the movie, the world beyond the wall looked like a foreign planet, with acid rain and pools of radioactive fluid everywhere.
I’m disappointed how there was a “camo” wall which hid the Bureau from being seen by the city. That was way too futuristic. So were the plane-like drones they flew around in. Tris and the team that made it past the wall were picked up by floating balls made of a futuristic material and were connected to the drones in the little pods- which were supposed to protect them from the “toxins.” None of this was ever mentioned in any of the books. The books portrayed the world beyond the wall as slightly more technologically advanced than modern day technology. The Bureau was stationed in the abandoned O’Hare airport. The movie got that right, but then decided to build an extremely bizarre tower with hovering elevators, which also was never mentioned in the book.
There are scenes of Bureau soldiers raiding the fringe (which in the novel was the abandoned towns around the Bureau, but in the movie was a collection of tarps and tents in the middle of the Venus-like land that Earth apparently turned into) and kidnapping children. Once they gathered all of the children, they proceeded to wipe their memories with an orange gas. I’m not sure how the script writers came up with this idea. Yes, there was a scene where children ran from Four and the rest of the workers from the Bureau who were walking around the fringe. One of the workers explained that the children feared that they were soldiers coming to rescue them and bring them to safety and proper shelter with protection. The children were taken from their families, but they would have better living conditions. Nowhere in the book was there any mention of wiping children’s memories.
The movie correctly included the memory serum that was supposed to be released throughout the city, but it wasn’t accurate. In the book, Four and a group went into the city to warn people and inoculate some. Four had a plan to slip away to give a vial of the memory serum to either his mother or father in order to stop the war between the factionless and the allegiant. In the movie, Four’s mother and Peter were controlling the memory serum dump onto the city, when it was actually supposed to be controlled by the Bureau like the book states.
I won’t even go into how bizarre the shower scene was. It was very drawn out and could have been eliminated because it was pointless to the movie and took up time they could have spent on making the movie more accurate to the book.
It almost seems as if the only thing that really followed the book was the title and characters’ names. It got ridiculous at points because it was so far off from the book. Many people in the theater with me actually got up and left.
Overall, there were so many flaws and differences between the movie and the novel. I understand that not every movie adaptation of a novel can perfectly resemble the book, but at least most movies try to be as accurate as possible, while leaving out some information to fit the time restrictions. This movie was extremely far reaching from the book and was too futuristic and unbelievable.
They set the ending up for a war between the Bureau and the city in the fourth installment, so I’m interested to see if they’ll create an alternate ending than the one in the book.
