With most of the world dead, the remains of humanity fence in the ruins of Chicago as they attempt to rebuild society. They have divided themselves into 5 factions: Abnegation, Candor, Dauntless, Erudite and Amity. You know, Dauntless are brave and happy while Candor are judges and lawyers. Yeah, it’s actually that stupid. When it comes to your sixteenth birthday one must sit a number of tests to determine the faction to which you will be assigned, but you can still chose if you want. Confusing? Nope, just extremely contradictory. When it comes to Tris’s (Woodley) tests something goes wrong and when she gets the opportunity to choose she picks Dauntless only to find out that the fun loving, constantly running for no reason, group are a much more militant and tough group than expected. Her training begins but she must hide the fact that she is Divergent from everyone because they will kill her if they find out, but then she’s the heroine of a trilogy so the chances of that happening are pretty damn slim.
This film and the books that it is based on represent someone attempting to cash in on the success of the Hunger Games series by writing something the same but not the same, or something like that. In reality, who really cares? The characters are poorly and unoriginally conceived. Theo James (the baddie from the inbetweeners movie) is absolute muck as Tris’s trainer/love-interest wandering around with a face on him that can only mean he’s doing his utmost not to fart in front of his co-stars. Jai Courtney is absolutely useless in everything here using his tank tops as a means of communicating his only asset; an average set of guns.
The only real light here is the decent Shailene Woodley who does her best with the material she is working with. She is undoubtedly a talented actress and she is above this dross but she’s gotta pay the bills and increase her profile so we can thank her agent and advisors for this mess. She is, unfortunately, unable to save this one and we are unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of a number of sequels, which we can assume will follow suit in being too long and too boring to care about.
Like the Hunger Games, but not really, Divergent is much like the first part of this sentence: very contradictory. Avoid.