Divergent made a nice chunk of change when it was released this past March, and pretty much assured itself three more years at the box office with its follow up installments. What was interesting about this film's success is that it was built on a book that really didn't seem cut out for a "one size fits all" young adult adaptation. As we've now learned today, the final product was trimmed just to do that and the original cut would have retained one of the key moments of violence from the text.
Yahoo scored the Divergent clip from the upcoming home video release's collection of deleted scenes. Among those scenes is one of the most important scenes setting up Peter (Miles Teller's antagonist) as a psychotic menace rather than the smart assed wimp that we got in the film. In the book, Peter actually stabs a kid in the eye in order to rank in first during the Dauntless initiation process.
Having read Divergent before seeing what passed as a film adaptation, I was particularly upset with this scene being cut, mostly because Peter is the greatest adversary to Tris during her initiation process. While the book portrays him as an evil and pretty vicious character, the film falls back on Miles Teller's background as a comedic actor and has him get snarky instead. Much like the omission of someone dying during the train jump at the beginning of the Dauntless initiation, this cut served to neuter the film into a safe, four quadrant PG-13 film; and it robbed Tris' journey of any dramatic stakes. You just didn't feel like she was in that much danger at any point in the film, and it ruined what the book stood for.
How the deleted scenes from Divergent will change the film's actual tone is still a mystery, but if more of the harsher omissions are included in the film, it might just make a decent re-cut project for any amateur film editors out there to undertake. Of course, with none of the writers being credited for Insurgent or Allegiant: Parts I and II, we might see a better film out of the further installments. Though considering Robert Schwentke, the man who directed R.I.P.D., is behind the former, and just might sign on for the latter, we may be facing some new problems altogether.
We'll see when Insurgent hits theaters on March 20, 2015. And you can catch Divergent on Digital HD now with the Blu Ray and DVD being released on August 5th.
