Diver­gent

Just as it would be wrong to wish a pox on Frank Capra’s It Hap­pened One Night for spawn­ing what we now term the ​“roman­tic com­e­dy” and all its gar­ish, shit-flecked antecedents (like, say, Fail­ure To Launch), it would also be wrong to blame The Hunger Games for the recent glut of car­bon-copy teen dystopia movies. Diver­gent is one such wannabe, a humour­less tween dirge whose prime func­tion is to keep time while we fever­ish­ly wait for Popin­jay Part One (or what­ev­er it’s called) to drop.

Again, human­i­ty has been dec­i­mat­ed and frac­tured by some mis­cel­la­neous glob­al tragedy, and the bureau­crat­ic brain trust has deemed that a rad­i­cal top-down restruc­tur­ing is what’s need­ed to keep the flame glow­ing for the long-haul. Yet, unlike The Hunger Games and its bina­ry, relat­able class-based divi­sion (elites rule work­ers), the wacky world of Diver­gent breaks things down fur­ther, offer­ing five sub-sects all with sil­ly names and sil­li­er uni­forms which, we’re assured, are able to co-exist in per­fect harmony.

These sub-sects are, bizarrely, based on per­son­al­i­ty, so there’s Abne­ga­tion (muslin-clad Haight-Asbury types who live in Cor­busier-like con­crete box­es and gov­ern the land), Ami­ty (sanc­ti­mo­nious hip­py peaceniks who work the fields), Can­dor (peo­ple who tell it like it is, man), Eru­dite (SS boffins who dress like trav­el agents and are, nat­u­ral­ly, pure evil) and Daunt­less (base-jump­ing gnarly/​rad crew who have bad tat­toos and head-butt walls cos they’re so freak­ing wild and crazy. Imag­ine if Stomp ran all world law enforce­ment…). And if, woe betide, you don’t hap­pen to con­form to one of these broad units, you are instant­ly cast out to live out your days as a bray­ing hobo.

Off the bat, Diver­gent fal­ters because the chess-board on which the pieces are mov­ing already has too many squares, too many colours and not enough inter­est­ing pieces to make the game at all excit­ing or intense. Reduc­ing the rich tapes­try of the human expe­ri­ence into five super-broad traits just seems doomed, ridicu­lous and high­ly cyn­i­cal — sure­ly some­one from Eru­dite would’ve been able to flag that one up?

Else­where, the set-up tries too hard to prize ideas and con­flicts into the sto­ry, and there’s nev­er a moment where the film con­vinces you as to why the rem­nants of the human race would ratio­nal­ly chose to organ­ise them­selves in such a fash­ion. Is it too much to expect a movie like this to have some­thing sophis­ti­cat­ed to say about insane polit­i­cal exper­i­ments gone awry? Per­haps, but when any and all char­ac­ter moti­va­tion is fuelled by con­text, then the prob­lems mount and the inter­est wanes as the min­utes tick by.

Shai­lene Wood­ley takes on the role of Beat­rice, the feisty young pre­tender who switch­es from Abne­ga­tion to Daunt­less dur­ing her choos­ing cer­e­mo­ny (some­thing involves drop­ping things in mas­sive bowls). Upon enter­ing her new life, she decides to short­en her name to Triss, which rhymes with Kat­niss. But, when under­go­ing her offi­cial test, it tran­spires that she isn’t just a sin­gle-trait automa­ton, and that she actu­al­ly fits into the unde­sir­able cat­e­go­ry of Diver­gent and must con­ceal her iden­ti­ty on pain of annihilation.

There’s no point in explain­ing machi­na­tions fur­ther, as you know exact­ly how this one goes down. There’s tri­umph over adver­si­ty, some light empow­er­ment, unfea­si­ble acts of brav­ery and lots and lots of total­i­tar­i­an stric­tures that make absolute­ly no sense what­so­ev­er. Wood­ley just about holds her own in the lead, but she made for much more pleas­ant com­pa­ny in more inti­mate dra­mas such as The Descen­dants and The Spec­tac­u­lar Now.

The remain­der of the cast are there as angu­lar win­dow-dress­ing and to spout the (often abysmal) dia­logue, the final irony being that, while bemoan­ing a soci­ety which crude­ly com­part­men­talis­es its pop­u­lous, Diver­gent itself offers up only dull, one-dimen­sion­al char­ac­ter archetypes.

They say that when life gives you lemons, you make lemon­ade. With Diver­gent, YA author Veron­i­ca Roth has giv­en direc­tor Neil Burg­er a hun­dred-weight of expired turnips, so it comes as no sur­prise that in watch­ing this movie we must con­tend with sup­ping from a giant crys­tal punch­bowl of acrid turnip juice.