From the Vault: Divergent

In which I review a film from my movie collection.

This was originally meant to be last week's Unreality Companion, but a disadvantageous work schedule paired with the perplexingly delayed publication of my article lead me to hold off on this review.  I wasn't about to let this one go to waste, though.  If I forced myself to sit through Divergent, I sure as Hell was going to make use of it.

When humanity turned on itself, it nearly wiped out the entire species.  Two hundred years after the devastating conflict, mankind has crawled back from the dystopian squalor in the ruins of what was once Chicago.  In order to promote harmony, society has divided itself into five different factions - based on a person's aptitudes and interests - each with a unique social function.  Dauntless are the combined police and military force, Amity are the farmers, Candor are the judiciaries, Erudite are the scientists and Abnegation are the governing body.

A rare few - known as Divergents - do not fit into any one faction.  They represent chaos within the carefully regimented Faction system and will invariably be executed if discovered.  One newly come of age Divergent, Triss, must choose which faction she is to join: a choice made all the more difficult by her infidelity toward any one of them.

A lot of issues that I took with Insurgent had taken root in the series' first installment.  Triss' divergent exceptionality still plays out like the personal fable - in which "an adolescent believes that they are the only super, special, rainbow, sparkle, sunshiny snowflake in the entire world." The Faction system ultimately still feels "like an especially angsty tween’s diary entries about why everybody else at her school is wrong for not let her sit at their table during lunch."  Plus there's still the implicit subtext that intelligence is an inherently corrupting virtue.

Where Divergent wins out over its sequel, however, is that these negative aspect haven't gotten fully out of hand yet.  The Faction system, despite its school cafeteria parallels, is still just a semi-unique twist to the whole sectioned-off dystopia trope.  Divergents don't quite seem like the self-aggrandizing plot device that Insurgent would turn it into.  While Erudite is still the antagonistic faction, it ultimately has less to do with them being too smart for their own good than it does with a Vulcanized rendition of their ideals.

The coming of age story that's at the core of the narrative is a perfectly sound one: emphasizing adolescents' struggle in finding their place in the world.  Triss is an ultimately likable character, even if she's shoehorned into the role of audience surrogate a little too forcefully.  The factions are well conceived and well designed, even if they are a little simplistic (although I admittedly came into the movie with Ravnica's ten-guild system in mind).  The set design was an imaginative blend of futuristic design amid the crumbling skyscrapers of the old world.  I even found myself  caring about who was cut from Dauntless and who progressed through the ranks.

There were only two places where the film dropped the ball.  I did not buy into Four's and Triss' relationship.  Understand that I'm not saying that their relationship would never work, because I really think that it would: down the line, at a different point of the narrative.  Their shared background, faction defection and divergence necessitated their eventual romance.  Their differences in age and rank, however, inherently precluded their romantic involvement during Triss' basic training.

The second point where the movie lost me was its awkwardly tagged-on climax.  Triss' basic training, upward trajectory through the Dauntless ranks and eventual acceptance into the faction should have been the end of it.  Yes, they established that there were increasing troubles between the Erudite and Abnegation factions, but nothing so substantially developed as to warrant as rushed and unfulfilling a climax as what actually occurred on screen.

The fact that the Dauntless were all mind controlled into serving the Erudite felt like a sorely missed opportunity to explore the political dealings between different factions and the conflicting loyalties of the Dauntless to protect everybody while simultaneously following orders.  There's even an evocative parallel to be made between the Dauntless' surprise attack on the Abnegation neighborhoods and the Nazi consolidation of the ghettos during the Holocaust.

But forget all of that jazz: mind control.  Easy.  Simple.  Done.

While far from the best YA franchise to come out of the post-Potter years, Divergent is an interesting addition to the adolescent cinematic landscape.  It's reasonably well acted, reasonably well written and reasonably well directed : serving as a perfectly reasonable coming of age story despite its obvious flaws.  Young fans of The Hunger Games will find a lot to enjoy in this story, even as older fans roll their eyes at it.

Rating:  7/10

Buy on BluRay:  Not if you already own the far superior Hunger Games

So what is your favorite movie adaptation of a YA novel?  Share your thoughts in the comment section below.

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