After the incredible success of Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight franchise and Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games franchise in recent years, Hollywood has gone crazy with Young Adult adaptations that feature female characters in the lead, or original movies geared to that crowd. Many movies have come and gone, such as the adaptation of Cassandra Clare’s first Mortal Instruments novel City of Bones or Richelle Mead’s Vampire Academy novel. There are others of course, many of them, but these two adaptations stand as two of the biggest box office failures, the latter more so since it failed to break even the $10 million mark. And now we have the adaptation to Veronica Roth’s Divergent, the first in a trilogy.
Divergent is set in a post-apocalyptic dystopian world where we glimpse a very small slice of humanity, living in Chicago with the city walled off from the rest of the world, ostensibly because of some kind of monsters or some such. This small slice of humanity has divided itself into five different factions, based on their work priorities and once children reach a certain age, they are placed into one of these actions, either by choice or through a… test. What follows should be clear enough I hope. As such premises go, Divergent is mildly interesting. But the story doesn’t hold water, and the acting is also quite sub-par, meaning that the final result and my verdict is a big zero.
Shadowhawk's Shade 