So this is what it looks like when
the Age of Teenaged Boys in movie culture starts to ebb, and the Age of Teenaged
Girls begins to rise. One might even wonder
just when this Dystopia-for-Girls fad will come to an end. Through how many games must we go hungry, or
through how many mazes must we run, before we pass puberty and get to wear
black leather, get cool tattoos, hang with vampires, lose our virginity and
overthrow all the fascist societies current popular fiction can throw at
us? Geez, Louise, but if Mad Max
stumbled across some place like these supposedly-dystopian cultures during his
wanderings after the bombs fell, he’d get disgusted pretty dang quickly and run
back to Thunderdome with a smile.
Well, anyways, here comes the
first installment of the latest “Young Adult” film franchise, Divergent, based on a
fairly-popular recent novel by Veronica Roth.
At some point a hundred or so years in our future, after some “war” that
resulted in all of the world except Chicago becoming uninhabitable (yeah,
Chicago – go figure), we find what’s left of humanity all under the age of
thirty (or at least it looks like the vast majority of it is – maybe this is
after the Logan’s Run
experiment failed) and divided into five “factions,” each of which serves a different
purpose in society. Those factions are Abnegation
(the selfless servants, and the faction currently governing), Amity (the kind
and charitable), Candor (the honest, mostly lawyers), Erudite (the intelligent
and scholarly) and Dauntless (the brave, which in this world means the soldiers
and cops, but these soldiers/cops are all into free-running for some reason). Sadly, some folks don’t fit into any of
these, and remain “faction-less” (or “bums,” as some of us might have called
them).
As
children reach the age of sixteen, they are tested to see if they are
better-suited to remain in the faction of their birth for the remainder of
their lives, or if they may have attributes that would be better put to use in
another faction. By some quirk of law,
however, when the day comes for them to submit to the ceremony that assigns
them to their future faction, they are free to choose ANY faction. This testing procedure sometimes reveals a
child who is “divergent,” meaning that he or she doesn’t fit into any of
society’s molds, and is quickly eliminated in the interest of maintaining
social order.
Along comes Beatrice Prior
(Shailene Woodley), from an Abnegation family, who takes the test and is found
to be a Divergent. The test’s
administrator risks her own life by quelching the test’s result and sending
Beatrice away, swearing her to secrecy. When
her Choosing Day comes, Beatrice surprises everyone by spurning her own faction
and choosing to join the Dauntless (no doubt thrilled by the “bad boys” as
every sixteen-year old girl ever born is). Renaming herself “Tris,” she struggles against
hostile drill sergeants, snotty fellow initiates and her attraction to an older
instructor to become worthy of the thrill-seeking Dauntlesses.
The first half of the film moves
along at a good pace, and while a little over-the-top in it’s trying to be
allegorical about society’s labeling folks, I didn’t find it boring. Seeing Tris begin to come of age and find a
direction for her life held my interest, and for that, plenty of praise for
Shailene Woodley is merited. All too
often, mid-twenty-somethings are asked to portray teenagers, but all too often,
they aren’t convincing. I did find it
easy to accept the 22-year old Woodley as the late-teenaged Beatrice, however. The flip side to this was twenty-eight year
old Theo James as Four, Tris’s instructor/paramour. Portraying some unspecified age that I took
to be along the lines of twenty-four or twenty-five, he sorta gave me the
willies with his Mad-Love for the seventeen or eighteen-year old Tris. I guess guys will still go for high school-aged
chicks even after the Apocalypse.
The second half of the movie got
pretty silly (for lack of a more eloquent adjective), however, as Tris learns
of the Erudites’ plan to use the Dauntlesses as an unwitting army in their plot
to overthrow the Abnegations. Her
failure to succumb to some mind-control serum reveals her to be a Divergent,
and thanks to some incredibly well-timed intervention from her Mommy, she
manages to escape her own execution and lead the team of rebels who thwart the
Erudites and start the resistance movement that presumably will someday free
all the huddled masses from… blah, blah, blah…
Personally, I’ve always preferred
to have the protagonist of any story I’m watching or reading find his/her own
way out of trouble, and it’s pretty much always a turn-off when I see a “hero”
having his/her fat pulled out of the proverbial fire by some random bit of luck
or some other character conveniently swooping in at the precise moment said
hero is about to get whacked. But I
digress…
There are several things to like
about Divergent, despite my
rolling my eyes at it a bit too often to declare it a success. Shailene Woodley is terrific in the lead
role, and if there is an actress who may be Jennifer Lawrence’s spiritual twin
working in movies these days, she must be it.
Lenny Kravitz’ little girl Zoe as a fellow Dauntless initiate was also
captivating, and thankfully, her role never degenerated into any sort of giggly
BFF-type. Kate Winslet, however, who was
most likely cast with the intention of providing enough gravitas to make
audiences think of the movie as something more than teenaged-fare, didn’t have
much to work with, as her part as the Erudite leader was so undeveloped that it
could’ve been played by just about any other capable film actress.
Director Neil Burger manages to
tell a sort of coming-of-age story in such a way that even one such as I could
remain interested, and I found the visual depiction of this city sealed off
from the rest of the world very impressive, but the third act of the plot
really spirals down to a Bella/Edward/Jacob level of drama, which plays better
to schoolgirls on the printed page than to mass audiences on film. Burger gave us the very interesting movie The Illusionist several years
ago, and more recently, the mildly popular Bradley Cooper vehicle Limitless (which I have not yet
seen, but about which I have heard good things), so despite my reservations
about Divergent’s source
material, I had higher hopes for this than I had for The Hunger Games (and let’s face it folks – without Hunger Games, there wouldn’t be
any Divergent).
I found myself asking questions of the movie
that it never answered; namely about such things as details about this “war”
that left Chicago in such dang good shape, and what awful things may lie beyond
the microwave tower-looking fences that now surround the city. Such answers are never given, or even hinted,
but I will assume all that is to be fodder for the already-planned sequels next
year and the year after that. I recall
having much the same number of questions about the universe of The Hunger Games, with a similar
lack of answers there. With how well
this movie managed to pull off the details of this world, and even create a
character that interested me, it was a disappointment that it didn’t manage to
find a way to tell a story that didn’t make we wonder when the post-adolescent vampires
were going to show up.
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