Divergent (2014)

7.5 of 10

Personal Bias Alert:  Read and liked the book, likes the YA female-led action trend, sick of love triangles

            As we all know, there is a deluge of young adult novels being adapted into movies right now.  Most are series, so the studio knows that if they produce a film good enough to appease preexisting fans, they will have another two or three movies that will be guaranteed to make them money.  Some people scoff at this as a blatant cash grab.  Some people write them all off as silly movies for teenage girls.  I’m not one of those people.  The way I see it is that this is simply a genre, with its own subgenres and tropes and restrictions.  Like any genre, there are good films and there are bad, and if you write off the entire thing you will miss some really great films.  “Divergent” isn’t the best this genre has to offer, but it’s far from the worst.

             “Divergent” falls into the dystopian subgenre, where society now organizes itself into five factions based on their personalities.  At sixteen, each person must choose which faction they want to join, and if they don’t fit into that faction they are kicked out to join the homeless people referred to as the factionless.  This isn’t the kind of society that is easy to portray on film and there is little time to explain it.  The screenwriters took the easy way out and had the main character Tris (Shailene Woodley) lay it all out in voiceover to start the film.  It’s clear but not very entertaining, and gets the movie off on the wrong foot.

            Once things get going the film moves along at a well-controlled pace, slowly building up speed without you realizing it.  Tris chooses to leave her family and join Dauntless, the brave, military-esque faction.  Fitting in proves to be hard and is made more complicated by the fact that she is divergent, meaning her personality doesn’t fit neatly into any of the factions.  Divergents are considered dangerous, and many people, including Kate Winslet’s Jeanine Matthews, are on the lookout for them.  Tris does her best to hide her divergence while trying to pass the rigorous initiation test for Dauntless.

            One aspect of the test involves Tris going into a hallucinatory state and being forced to work through her deepest fears.  These are unnerving scenes filmed with a visual flair that make them highlights of the film.  When Tris encounters and overcomes one fear, the scene immediately folds into another, leaving Tris and the audience scrambling to determine what is coming at her next.  It’s unrelenting, and the fact that the fears are character-specific only makes it more engrossing.

            Shailene Woodley handles these action sequences well and seems comfortable carrying such a large film.  She stumbles some in the more nuanced scenes, going a bit bigger than necessary.  Theo James as Four, Tris’s love interest, brings a rigidness that fits his character.  Both performances have their faults, but they oddly balance each other almost perfectly.  The film bucks the love triangle trend, allowing Tris to fall exclusively for Four.  That puts a lot of pressure on Woodley and James to have chemistry, and they seem to fall in love with each other with ease.  That duo was expertly cast and should be capable of carrying the rest of the films in the series.

            The film’s focus takes a turn at the end.  Having read the book, I knew it was coming, but I think it’s handled well.  The steadily increasing pace prepped for it, so by the time everything is revealed, you’re ready for the big ending.

            Other Notes:
Ø  It’s a “The Spectacular Now” reunion!
Ø  In other casting news, Zoë Kravitz plays a friend of Tris.  Zoë is Lenny Kravitz’s daughter, who plays Cinna in “The Hunger Games.”  That family is locking down the YA female-led action movies.
Ø  The music was a little too emotionally manipulative for my taste.
Ø  I tried to refrain from comparing this to any of the other films in this genre, but it’s hard not to considering how much I enjoyed one of the other ones.  *cough* “Catching Fire” *cough*