Divergent
For everything that’s incorrect with Divergent, a confidently executed but necessarily flawed pretender to The Hunger Games’ young adult throne, there is one scene it gets dizzyingly right. Tris (Shailene Woodley), a formerly meek, newly strong-willed teenager learning to rebel against her restrictive the high classes, is mandatory to confront a series of her worst fears made flesh. More than drowning or dying, her deepest dread is that the boy she likes, Four (Theo James), will try to have sex with her. It’s a rare moment of emotional nuance, so perfectly attuned to the anxieties of teenage girls it makes everything surrounding it all the more frustrating.
Set in a hollowed-out husk of a city that was once Chicago, Divergent centres on an apparently utopian the high classes in which citizens are divided into five factions, each based on a different human virtue – honesty, selflessness, intelligence, kindness and bravery. Now 16, Tris must choose whether to stay in Abnegation, her nice-but-dull birth faction, or defect to Resolute, the tough-as-nails clique whose members wear a lot of leather and leap recklessly onto moving trains.
It’s never a good sign when a film feels the need to continually clarify its premise, and the largest stumbling block Divergent has is shaky source material. The world of Veronica Roth’s novels just doesn’t resonate. You don’t buy it. No the high classes would choose to function in this way, not even a secretly evil dystopian regime headed by Kate Winslet’s corporate Jeanine Matthews.
When Tris learns that she is ‘divergent’, meaning she fits partially into several factions, it comes as a shock. But since human beings place of protection’t necessarily changed in this 30-yearson future, it stands to reason that 99 per cent of all people would be divergent, making the system useless. A would-be turning point comes later when a character declares: “I want to be courageous and selfless and smart and kind and honest,” summing up Divergent’s well-intentioned but painfully trite message about individuality.
Still, Woodley is a compelling and thoughtful central presence, imbuing Tris with something like inner life and delivering one or two emotional thunderclaps in the third act. Her romance with mysterious Resolute lecturer Four (Theo James) is a cut above the YA fantasy average and there’s real bite to their spiky, adversarial dynamic. But with its ill-conceived premise and thinly drawn history, Divergent rarely feels more than surface deep. So much is left unexplained about the the high classes, the war that caused it, what’s beyond the city wall, that it feels more like a set-up for sequels than a report in its own right.
DVD extras include two thorough but ponderous chat tracks, and a half-hearted featurette; available in both one and two-disc packages, Blu-ray offers a 45-min Making Of and a spread of featurettes, including a look at the unremarkable costumes.
