Divergent? More Like "Why-Vergent"
- Thread starter MovieBob
- Start date
i kinda knew this Movie to me looked Bad.. but your Run down makes it sound far worse then i thought.. it might
Thank god I'm not the only one who had no idea what in name of the Golden Throne this movie was about. I had a feeling this movie was going to suck but damn Bob, sounds like you should have gotten some hazard pay for this one.The Gentleman said:
I remember when I saw this trailer the first time and I thought, "So...Twilight in the future?" And not the good Twilight in the future, with the eye patch and combat mane. Sounds like I was right. Worse, a lot of my friends on Facebook are posting about how amazing this movie was and I just shake my head.
If you guys think this sounds bad, go take a gander at the first episode of the CW's new show "The 100". All teenage idiocy aside they should actually put a "stupid" tax on anything that patently doesn't do any research.
All of these (emphasis: ALL OF THESE) "Me-Too-Not-Twilights" are getting annoying and predictable. They've become the new desperate movie industries' Will Smith blockbuster. Please - PLEASE! - tell me there is nothing after the Divergent series that young girls are reading.
Please?
Please?
I figured out why the snarky asides sort of rub me up the wrong way. A snarky aside is meant to function partly like a metaphor partly like an in-joke, right? When you say DC's new superhero film is so bad it's making the Green Latern look like a beacon of brilliance, you're giving context for just how bad it is and we're all meant to smile and remember 'yeah Green Lantern was a terrible film'. It gives us that nice feeling of social inclusiveness that we get when we feel like our ideas are in sync with everyone elses.
But when you snarky aside about something that isn't established as terrible it feels like you're breaking a social contact. Instead of getting that feeling of social inclusiveness it feels like someone just brought up politics at a funeral. It's not an environment where we're expecting ideas to be put forth and exchanged so instead it's like the author is trying to sneak it under the table and have a go at you for having a different opinion. And obviously it clearly fails at giving context to.
So it#s annoying when something like the Hunger Games receives these sort of asides. If you want to talk about how you disagree with the way other people think about the Hunger Games you need to write about the Hunger Games. It's like you're saying 'Okay guys, we all agree that left-wing viewpoints are a pile of rubbish, right?'. Can you see how that comes off as a little.. well obnoxious? And it's silly because you're a great writer with really interesting ideas and pretty darn insightful and respectful and yet these little things provoke bad-will in me that your articles completely don't deserve, that I then have to fight down and purposely remind myself that it's just a nonsensical socially conditioned response.
But when you snarky aside about something that isn't established as terrible it feels like you're breaking a social contact. Instead of getting that feeling of social inclusiveness it feels like someone just brought up politics at a funeral. It's not an environment where we're expecting ideas to be put forth and exchanged so instead it's like the author is trying to sneak it under the table and have a go at you for having a different opinion. And obviously it clearly fails at giving context to.
So it#s annoying when something like the Hunger Games receives these sort of asides. If you want to talk about how you disagree with the way other people think about the Hunger Games you need to write about the Hunger Games. It's like you're saying 'Okay guys, we all agree that left-wing viewpoints are a pile of rubbish, right?'. Can you see how that comes off as a little.. well obnoxious? And it's silly because you're a great writer with really interesting ideas and pretty darn insightful and respectful and yet these little things provoke bad-will in me that your articles completely don't deserve, that I then have to fight down and purposely remind myself that it's just a nonsensical socially conditioned response.
I read the first book; it wasn't groundbreaking or even particularly special (this might be because I'd already aged out of the intended audience and was reading for my sister's sake), but it addressed a lot of the things that Moviebob talks about, so I'm guessing there is serious adaptation decay.
The point of the test was that the kids don't often change because of the pressure to conform. Bob doesn't seem pleased with how it turned out on film, but the big themes of the book were conformity, false choices, and the flaws of assigning certain characteristics to people and expecting them to live up to them. For instance, the reason the Nerds are evil is because, according to the way their society is organized, they are supposed to remain scientists and researchers while the Ghandis (who are supposed to be meek and self-sacrificing) run the government. The Nerds (led by the ambitious ones) get fed up with this and decide that their logical rule would be better for society, because they've been assured that they are the smartest people in society by default. Meanwhile, Divergence seems to be a lot more common than the people running the system would have you believe (surprise, their personality test that sorts you into one of five categories is not perfect), but that information is suppressed to ensure the system stays in place. Heavy-handed, yes, but still pretty reasonable as far as sci-fi plots go.
Unfortunately for MovieBob, he isn't BookBob.
I pointed this out about Twilight and Hunger Games already. Any time you take a first person novel and place it into a movie (which by default is third person) and you aren't narrating the whole thing, its going to suffer.
I really liked the Hunger Games (novel) and thought that the movie was only mediocre. The problem is that the interesting parts of the books are the thought processes in the characters heads. Their actions are merely a result of those thoughts.
While the book is in no way groundbreaking, it is quite entertaining and well written. I will wait for a home version of the movie though.
PS. The zipline is something the Dauntless do because they exhibit thrill seeking behaviour and zip lining off the tallest building seems exciting. I would do it.
I pointed this out about Twilight and Hunger Games already. Any time you take a first person novel and place it into a movie (which by default is third person) and you aren't narrating the whole thing, its going to suffer.
I really liked the Hunger Games (novel) and thought that the movie was only mediocre. The problem is that the interesting parts of the books are the thought processes in the characters heads. Their actions are merely a result of those thoughts.
While the book is in no way groundbreaking, it is quite entertaining and well written. I will wait for a home version of the movie though.
PS. The zipline is something the Dauntless do because they exhibit thrill seeking behaviour and zip lining off the tallest building seems exciting. I would do it.
I looked that up on IMDB, and the premise sounds idiotic enough. But what research exactly are they ignoring? I'm guessing anything about genes, nuclear fallout and devastation etc., but if you could elaborate, I'd be pleased.PuckFuppet said:
OT: I dunno, this doesn't seem to have gotten quite the kicking other YA novel adaptations have recently. Jeremy Jahns, Chris Stuckmann and the Schmoes Know all gave it a positive review. Maybe Bob's just more burnt out on this stuff than others.
I'm not sure perspective is the problem. Movies/ TV does not have to be third person by default. just go watch an episode of Scrubs. The entire show is J.D.'s thought process because being inside his head is important for the narrative of the show. If the thoughts inside a characters head are important for the narrative there are ways to convey that. It just might take a little bit more care in scree play writing and acting chopsFoolKiller said:
ITT: Every YA-fiction-book-turned-movie is "Twilight" for some reason.
Yeah ok.
OT: I saw it last night and thought it was decent. Not great, but decent. The movie doesn't get exciting until the third act, when the big debacle finally goes down. They hint at it all throughout the first two, and I remember thinking, "Where's that movie? I want to see that one. I could care less about whether or not Triss passes her final exam I already know she's going to pass."
Clearly she should have just joined the hippie farmer faction then none of this would have happened.
Also the idea that only a handful of people are (gasp) multifaceted and can't be easily fit into one box is stupid.
Yeah ok.
OT: I saw it last night and thought it was decent. Not great, but decent. The movie doesn't get exciting until the third act, when the big debacle finally goes down. They hint at it all throughout the first two, and I remember thinking, "Where's that movie? I want to see that one. I could care less about whether or not Triss passes her final exam I already know she's going to pass."
Clearly she should have just joined the hippie farmer faction then none of this would have happened.
Also the idea that only a handful of people are (gasp) multifaceted and can't be easily fit into one box is stupid.
All of the research. From charting the effects a nuclear war _might_ have to...bartholen said:
Ok, I'll boil it down to a single point. So they're sending the kids down there to determine if the planet can support a long term recolonisation, if they go down they probably won't be able to get back up and there are certain levels of radiation/survival they are prepared to accept (all infeasibility of their century long survival on a bunch of coupled together space stations aside that isn't an entirely ignorant of the research motivation) and their primary goal is to check the radiation levels on the surface.
So they strap the kids into a reentry vehicle, all 100 in one vehicle (physics is rolling its eyes at this point), and slap an extremely complicated wristband on them that is capable of tracking their health. Wait... they have 100 disposable wristband things that are capable of tracking their health? Surely is just a simple "alive/not alive" thing.
No? It measures and transmits data about heart rate, blood pressure, respiratory rate, body temperature, glucose levels, plasma osmolarity, pulse oximetry and capnography (how?) oh ok... wait why don't you just strap a dosimeter to that?
Never even seems to come up, the people on the station are constantly glued to the screens watching what is going on below in terms of health, actively fighting over whether the deaths are being caused by radiation or if something else is causing it, and no one thinks "Shit, we should have put a dosimeter up in that."?
This is before you start talking about how they sidestepped the coriolis effect with their rotation station and how that wouldn't replicate true g... I can't even man.
Well thanks for the rundown MovieBob. We all know exactly what to do with this movie now...
...Which of course is to GO SEE IT IMMEDIATELY!
Seriously, this sounds like the best bad faux-highschool movie since "Bratz". I get the feeling I'm gonna be able to bask in its awesome stupidity for days.
...Which of course is to GO SEE IT IMMEDIATELY!
Seriously, this sounds like the best bad faux-highschool movie since "Bratz". I get the feeling I'm gonna be able to bask in its awesome stupidity for days.
I can't be the only one who sees the irony of a story's themes being about throwing off labelling and social constrictions, but then said story only giving 'the power' to be good a more than one thing to a select, special elite. xD
The odd thing is that the idea of a dystopia itself is not bad; 1984 is one of my favorite books and has a dystopian future that could easily be adapted for the teenage audience. The issue is that these YA novels seem to only be based on appealing to base teenage experience (discontent, rebellion and the like) and not anything higher like "social order, dichotomy of liberty/security" and the like which was probably what dystopian fiction was originally written for.Scrumpmonkey said:
If you have to make a dystopian future try what some of Project Itoh [http://www.crunchyroll.com/anime-news/2014/03/21/noitamina-anime-movie-to-adapt-project-itohs-sci-fi-novels] has written: perfect health and enforced kindness gone wrong, a world of fear with murder on the rise. Hell, Psycho pass could probably be adapted into a YA novel given what those with high crime coefficients are treated as but no, we have to have the same old "high school dichotomy, and generational discontent". You know what did the themes of Hunger games better: Battle Royale due to its commentary on the generational difference between the old and young as well as the effects of being thrown in a death ring. We don't need another hunger games, another divergent, or another giver: we need YA novels that are willing to introduce tough topics to teenagers.
P.S. what is your opinion on Battle Royale? I can't seem to get a read on how you feel about it from your post.