Today's review: Divergent

Divergent: **/*****, or 5/10

There is nothing 'divergent' about Divergent. It's a formulaic piece catering to the prime Hollywood target audience of young adults in every conceivable way (save for the absence of the near obligatory love triangle perhaps). Accusations that it was only produced to cash in on the success of the superior The Hunger Games franchise among that most lucrative demographic cannot be denied a certain degree of validity. Divergent is a predictable teen flick with overt aspirations to grow into a full fledged franchise too, and it continuously feels as such upon viewing.

The greatest pleasure to be had from the film is the set-up of its admittedly ludicrous dystopian society, a singular form of repressive civilization that feels completely untenable from the get-go and unsurprisingly proves just that over the course of the plot. Sometime in the future the world order has collapsed. The city of Chicago – or what's left of it, as it still appears rather disheveled – has cut itself off from the rest of the world by an enormous fence, protecting the supposedly harmonious society within from the ruined world outside. Life is determined by belonging to one of five factions: Abnegation (selfdenial and government), Dauntless (police/army), Erudite (science), Candor (law/order) and Amity (farming/food production). Children grow up with their parents in one of these groups, but get to pick their own faction at the age of sixteen after a harrowing personality test, potential family pressure to stay in their current niche notwithstanding. There is also a number of factionless people, those that failed to cut it in the factions they chose, who are tolerated despite seemingly not contributing anything to society. Of course, rivalry and shady alliances have formed between the various factions, and nobody appears to like Abnegation as they seem a redundant part of the whole. There's your overall plot right there.

Enter Beatrice Prior (Shailene Woodley, aged 23), a 16-year old girl who never felt truly at home growing up as a child of Abnegation parents but kept her personal convictions all bottled up. When the test reveals her personality not to fit in into any one specific group but rather to carry qualities of all, her sympathetic test agent labels her a 'Divergent' and swiftly falsifies her results, as these rare outcasts are considered a danger to society because of their mental versatility and are eliminated accordingly. You'd think the people who came up with this social pattern would have opted for the city to be run by Divergents to coordinate the other factions and guide them to get along better for the good of the whole, but that would put an abrupt ending to the following two hours of Beatrice's self-exploration. When the choice is put before her, she goes with Dauntless, because that's where all the cool kids are. This future dystopia is actually little more than a caste system reflecting an ordinary contemporary schoolyard, where the usual stereotypical classifications of punks, nerds and the like are strictly adhered to by people of all ages. Really scary, not to be able to break away from the high school pecking order for the rest of your life.

After abandoning her parents and changing her name to the much slicker 'Tris', our protagonist is confronted by a rigorous mental and physical training, to get rid of her former abnegating life and determine whether she's tough enough to join the warrior caste. Fortunately for her, her enigmatic tutor Four (Theo James) proves a likeable guy with a killer body and charms to match. You know where this is going the moment they first meet. If you're hoping to see more of the logistics of this particularly unlikely dystopia, you're out of luck, as most of what follows revolves around Tris and Four (too) slowly but (too) surely getting romantically entangled and making that most shocking of discoveries imaginable; they're both Divergents. As much as Woodley is no Jennifer Lawrence, the chemistry between her and James is passable at best, but never thoroughly engaging. The same is true for the interaction between both characters and their peers, while the more experienced actors among the cast hardly get a good chance to shine. Even Kate Winslet, an otherwise impeccable actress who has ever proven a joy to behold, delivers a less than stellar performance in her role as the movie's baddie, an Erudite official out to wipe out the Abnegation caste, including Tris' parents, so her scientist order can take control of the system. It's a diabolical ploy nobody is surprised to encounter after the first five minutes of exposition of Divergent, which already convinced the spectator this form of government was doomed from its infancy. Our heroic duo of Divergents swiftly prove their worth as they figure out a way to halt Winslet's evil plot of assuming mind control of Dauntless to annihilate Abnegation. However, since there's two more books and three more films to follow, don't expect them to get thanked for their decisive actions just yet.

Ideologically speaking, Divergent's plea against mindless conformation and its case for individual freedom is handled just a little too obviously. The movie proves a teenage angstfest, laced with the pubescent search for personal identity and the development of the sense of true belonging to such an excessive degree that the plot's metaphorical value is utterly wasted. Tris gets to question her role in society through all the tests and challenges to such a lengthy extent her process of selfdiscovery simply starts to bore us. Whereas the fear of growing up to the status of adulthood and the anxiety regarding the need to fit into society's often repressive standards were addressed to much better results in the Hunger Games franchise, such thoughts prove all too overt and in-your-face in Divergent. Nevertheless, there is room for improvement as much for this film as there was for the first installment of that rival series. Now that the set-up is over and done with, the viewer does wonder where the plot (not the romance that is) goes from here. The brief glimpses – limited both in terms of scope and frequency, mostly due to budget restrictions no doubt – we witnessed of this odd dystopian future do leave room for curiosity as to how exactly this world functions, as it has done for an alleged century. Considering the target audience has flocked en masse to theaters to get lost from their own woes and indentify with these relatable issues (for them at least), those sequels have been guaranteed. Hopefully a final similarity to The Hunger Games can be made in the future, as Divergent's sequel proved to be much more intricately crafted than its otherwise bland and forgetful predecessor.

Today's Mini-Review: Contagion

Rating: ****/*****, or 7/10

Starring: Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard

Directed by Steven Soderbergh

USA: Warner Bros., 2011

Steven Soderbergh's cautionary tale about the dangerous reality that is (and/or could be) a deadly global pandemic and its disastrous effects of human society and sense of morality proves an often harrowing but ultimately overly clinical film. Gwyneth Paltrow returns home from a business trip (which included some secret bedding out of wedlock) and is struck by seizures. Her husband Matt Damon rushes her to a hospital where she soon dies, much to everybody's shock and surprise. Her demise is only the beginning, as the disease that killed her – a fictional form (fortunately!) of meningoencephalitis – soon manifests itself all over the globe. The social order starts to break down everywhere as governments are unable to cope with the sudden onslaught that plagues their citizens. Experts from the CDC and WHO attempt to find a cure and to locate the origin of the outbreak but are hindered by problems as diverse as boundaries in their professional ethics, conspiracy bloggers inciting public revolt against the rule of law for their own profit, and the overall fear and hopelessness that drives people to extremes they would otherwise never consider, just to survive another day. The result is a carefully woven mosaic of various plot lines that never merge but end up making for an excellently rounded structure as a whole in terms of exploring the nature of the virus, its effects on global society and the race for ending its reign of terror. Though credit has to be given to Soderbergh and his team for keeping this narrative as close to reality as possible, both for chilling us to the bone and for the benefit of our education, it's hard to deny the film's occasional uneven pace and its constant need for overexplaining the more technical situations portrayed, even though it's tremendously helpful in understanding the motions of science in hazardous scenarios like these, and provides some always welcome intellectual uplifting of the audience in general. At times it feels a documentary would have better suited this topic (and no doubt some have). An all-star cast is brought on board to demonstrate how swiftly a lethal, worldwide viral outbreak makes an end to everyday life and in some instances, human values we claim to hold dear until circumstances prove us otherwise.

Though convincing performances are found throughout, in hindsight it would have been more apt to have these characters be played by less known talents to increase the level of realism Contagion aims for. Though the likes of Matt Damon, Marion Cotillard, Kate Winslet, Laurence Fishburne and Jude Law are undoubtedly just as susceptible to nasty diseases as the rest of us (unless fortune really is a cure for every illness), their struggle against the horrible infliction in question doesn't feel as grounded in reality as it ought to because of the high level of internationally familiar faces and the lack of “normal people” in major roles throughout the whole. The movie's overall style is rather cold and detached, a tone many spectators would expect a scientifically accurate story to convey, while the human element is relegated to the background a little too much. Soderbergh focuses on the microcosm of things, so scenes of mass panic and rampant lawlessness are absent though they are referred to abundantly, which doesn't make the concerns addressed in this film feel as immediate and as serious as we are meant to experience them. Contagion is a fine attempt at explaining in a scientifically correct sense what very well could (and most likely would) transpire if it came down to a global pandemic of this magnitude – the death toll at the end of the film reaches 26 million people – but its reliance on letting science determine the course of the film doesn't make for as compelling and intense a drama as it should have been.