![]() Firstly, you’ve gotta enter it by jumping off a skyscraper, into a narrow hole and onto a trampoline (ugh, the world is a gym), and then you’re forced to share a block of unisex toilets that don’t even have cubicles, walls or doors! Since we don’t get any scenes of the Dauntless recruits shitting side-by-side, I can only imagine they’ve been backed up for weeks. Aussie actor Jai Courtney - who plays thick-necked bad guy, Eric - doesn’t fare much better, sporting a couple of block-y barcodes that you might find on an ex-goth.ĭauntless HQ is a depressing underground hellhole, especially compared to the open watermelon fields of Amity or the sun-drenched libraries of Erudite. “I can’t be.” Well, you’re kinda one thing right now, guy - a massive wanker with a shitty tattoo. Of course, it’s personally significant: “I don’t want to be just one thing,” he says, with sad eyes. Four - Tris’s love interest (played by James Franco-on-roids-lookalike, Theo James) - sports a gigantic monstrosity that covers his whole back. Tattoos are big in Dauntless, everyone has one they’re basically like a gang of food truck chefs. I guess I can understand the allure of wanting to hang out with these guys, especially if you wish your whole life was a gym session or an ‘80s training montage. When they’re not ziplining across the city’s skyline, they’ll most likely be found back in their dank underground home, hitting punching bags or doing capoeira. They spend most of their lives jumping across city buildings, crawling into holes, and relentlessly running around the city streets like a dance flash mob. Our first introduction to the menacing marauders of Dauntless finds the gang leaping off a speeding train, wooing and high-fiving like kids in a Coke commercial. How annoying are Dauntless? Let us count the ways… ![]() “They’re such knobheads.” Even Erudite, the evil smart folks, or Candor, who are basically a bunch of lawyers, look like enticing options compared to the angry gym club that is Dauntless. ![]() It is pretty much the same as Games, give or take a bow and arrow.“Why would she choose to join Dauntless?”, you’ll ask yourself throughout the film, questioning the taste of an entire generation of young people. What novelist Roth aimed for was a parable about creating well-rounded, compassionate adults in a world where “the system” is literally inside your head.Īs science fiction, the story is no heavier than Ender’s Game or any of the other young-adult fare in the genre.īut Hunger Games fans shouldn’t feel superior in looking down on the sci-fi variation on the rebel-teen theme. But Woodley makes Tris vulnerable and cunning as she is given drugs that play tricks on her mind to test her. That is especially true when you compare her with the raw-boned and gangly Jennifer Lawrence of the Hunger Games movies. And, yes, she seems too dainty and fragile for soldiering. No, she doesn’t have any memorable lines. Woodley is a wonderful, transparent actress who lets us see her thoughts, especially about the hunky standoffish Dauntless lad (Theo James) who trains her. Tris keeps her status a secret as she chooses the Dauntless faction and undertakes training with the leather-jacketed jocks - learning to fight with guns, knives and her fists learning to conquer her fears. The tester (Maggie Q) tells her that she is Divergent and that the other factions fear Divergents. Leading up to the test, Tris is confused she is empathetic but fearless, smart but earthy. When teens hit a certain age, they go through an aptitude test and are told where their strengths lie.Īt the Choosing Ceremony, they cut their hands and, with drops of their blood, declare their faction for life. The Candor faction is famed for popping off without self-censoring the Amity faction consists of earnest workers and land-loving farmers.Ībegnations may “reject vanity” and wear drab clothes, but that doesn’t mean a girl can’t have makeup, lip gloss and highlights. Inside the city, society function thanks to “factions.” ![]() Tris Prior (Shailene Woodley) lives in a postwar future in semi-ruined Chicago, where the elevated trains still run but a fence separates the city from the devastated outside world. Remember: One has Katniss for a heroine the other, Tris - a world of difference. So let’s skip any suggestions of novelist Veronica Roth knocking off the formula of Suzanne Collins’ Games books. Yet the new film is more streamlined, with a love story featuring real heat and deaths featuring real pathos.Īnd director Neil Burger ( The Illusionist, Limitless) inserts the audience into the dystopian world with a lack of fuss that the stiff, exposition-stuffed Games films haven’t managed. Divergent, the latest outcast-teenager-battles-the-system thriller, is so similar to The Hunger Games that it might be dismissed by Katniss fans.
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