Divergent
2016 03 25
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Being the great lover of dystopian fiction that I am, I have both read the Divergent books and seen the Divergent films. I just finished watching the last film, Allegiant.
There is a major film spoiler contained herein. Consider yourselves fairly warned.
Once again, Hollywood shows its true colours in the sanitisation of story, proving that it has no faith that people can handle a story that either doesn't have a happy ending, or has a happy ending stemming from the tragic hero's death. Disney sanitised The Little Mermaid. I grew up just fine knowing that, in the end, the mermaid commits suicide. Even the end of Brazil was "happied up" for an American audience. The rest of the world did not have to deal with the driving-off-into-the-sunset bullshit that the US audience got. My personal favourite is the sanitised version of A Clockwork Orange that was published in the US without the 21st, and last, chapter, where Alex talks about the futility, inavoidability, and cyclicalness of certain aspects of life.
Stories don't always end clean. Rough edges happen. The boy doesn't always get the girl. People don't always ride off into the sunset. People die. Heroes fail. Sometimes there is no hero. Sometimes the villain and the hero are the same person. Justice doesn't always prevail. Love doesn't conquer all. People don't always live happily ever after. That's life. It's an insult when you take a popular story and clean it up for papped public consumption.
In the case of the Allegiant story, by Tris not dying at the end, you have just ruined the entire point of the story, of Tris. Stripping her sacrifice out of the story robs the story of its point. Very large chunks of the Bible would be bereft of a point had Jesus got up out of Lazarus' tomb and kept walking, or had he not shown up in Gethsemane at all.