Wow. That might be the only way to describe the newly-released Divergent movie. While reviews of the movie have stayed on the lower side, most fans of the book series absolutely loved the movie, myself included. It had its ups and downs, but was a great movie nevertheless.

One of the most notable differences between the book and movie was the absence of a pivotal character, Uriah, from the movie. Fans created quite the uproar when the final cast list was announced. While Uriah wasn’t in the first movie of the series, he has been confirmed for the second movie. Veronica Roth addressed the issue on her personal blog, saying, “It is understandably disappointing when a favorite character doesn’t make it on screen. However, what I do think is encouraging is that the people working on the movie are taking the role of Uriah so seriously and taking so much care to get him right.”

Even though the movie lacked some scenes from the book that were relatively unimportant, it did a great job of including the more well-known scenes. They were executed well and definitely conveyed the same emotions as those from the book. Fans seem to have enjoyed the romantic scenes between main characters, Four and Tris, as well as the more humorous scenes thrown in throughout the movie.

Overall, the movie lacked the expected amount of action and could have followed the plot of the book more closely. Personally, I didn’t think the changes to the plot made much of an impact on the general story, but there were many times where I found myself yelling at the screen because someone did something stupid and/or different from the book. However, if you disregard the obvious differences from the book, the movie was great and was definitely worth seeing.