By Kyle Osborne
One way to judge the success of a film is whether the audience for whom it’s made can get into it. Oh, people will tell you that their films are made for “everyone to see and love,” but make no mistake, there is a “target demo” for which films like ‘Divergent’ are made. And they did hit the target, but fell short of a bullseye.
Just about everything I’m going to say will sound like I’m talking about “The Hunger Games,” a trilogy of young adult books, set in a dystopian future, with a young, strong female protagonist. Now switch out Jennifer Lawrence for Shailene Woodley, add some much cooler art direction, and take away some silliness, and you’ve got “Divergent.”
Chicago in the future is a field of battered buildings, surrounded by a menacing wall/fence that is supposedly keeping bad things away, really seems like a way to keep people in.
Society is segregated into people with similar traits; there are Erudites, The Amity,The Candor, The Abnegation, the selfless Good Samaritans, to which our heroine belongs—that is until she reaches the age where one is tested and decides where they’ll go. Triss chooses the Dauntless, the tattooed and pierced parkour people who are like city soldiers. And that’s the group Triss joins, leaving poor Mom and Dad behind.
But here’s the dramatic wedge—she’s really a “Divergent”—she has qualities of multiple groups which, in this mean-spirited future world is the same as having none. And so the tension within the story hangs on whether she can fit in with the Dauntless without giving her true self away. One of her leaders, a guy called Four, played by the hunky Theo James , is obviously being set up as a possible love interest, and perhaps he’s hiding some secrets of his own. The movie is well cast and the characters are nearly all memorable.
The problem with Part One films of trilogies is that, by nature, there’s a lot of exposition—they have to set things up before the story can build momentum and get cracking. As Part One’s go, “Divergent” does an okay job of that. There are some thrilling sequences, cool visuals and Woodley is an actress you instinctively root for.
The problem is that the film is two hours and twenty minutes long. There are at least three or four points where they could’ve closed this book and teased the next one, rather than take the bloated path of giving us too much of what was an okay thing.
But let’s get back to that target—will readers of the books find what they’re looking for? I think so, this film, unlike the “Hunger Games” series is more gritty, less cartoony, actually pretty violent, though it stays within its PG-13 boundaries.
I didn’t hate it, but after the two hour mark I felt like I was the one being tested—could I withstand the excess and join the club? Barely, I guess. But that was just enough for 2 ½ Stars out of 4.