Like The Hunger Games, Logan’s Run, and The Road something happened about a hundred years ago in Divergent and the survivors create a New World Order that everyone follows to the letter. Add a bit of Huxley’s Brave New World division of labor and mix with some teen angst-viola!
The bulk of Divergent feels like Ender’s Game, where we have a group of nasty evil people teaching children how to be nasty and evil. There’s a lot of running and jumping and shooting and knife throwing. All of this takes place in what’s left of Chicago and there are some pretty impressive special effects of the city in ruins and the dry river beds and such.
The crux of the story has to do with one of the five groups wanting to take power away from another group. Since none of these groups have any relation to reality as we know it, it’s hard to feel too much sympathy for any of them. I didn’t even find the loss of characters to be very compelling. I didn’t care that our hero was a Divergent or what being a Divergent meant. The story of this little pocket of reality just didn’t do much for me.
In all fairness, I’m not a teenage girl who might think this boyish woman is some kind of role model. I found Divergent to lack what little originality can be found in Twilight and I found the cast to be lackluster compared to the cast of The Hunger Games films.
So how about judging Divergent on its own merits without comparing it to every other YA movie to come out over the past ten years? I found it pretty dull.
