Watch Divergent Online."Divergent" is all about identity—about searching your soul and determining who you are and how you fit in as you emerge from adolescence to adulthood. So it's all too appropriate that the film version of the wildly popular young adult novel struggles a bit to assert itself as it seeks to appeal to the widest possible audience.
Watch Divergent Online Free
Watch Divergent Online Free
It's the conundrum so many of these types of books face as they become pop-culture juggernauts and film franchises: which elements to keep to please the fervent fans and which to toss in the name of maintaining a lean, speedy narrative? The "Harry Potter" and "Hunger Games" movies—which "Divergent" resembles in myriad ways—were mostly successful in finding that balance.
In bringing the first novel of Veronica Roth's best-selling trilogy to the screen, director Neil Burger ("Limitless") and screenwriters Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor have included key moments and images but tweaked others to streamline the mythology and move the story along. The results can be thrilling but the film as a whole feels simultaneously overlong and emotionally truncated.
They’re divided into factions whose titles derive, not all that grammatically, from human virtues—Abnegation, Erudite, Candor, Amity and Dauntless. Like the book, the movie finds no virtue in humor, but it does represent a new kind of action adventure based on interminable training, much of it video-game-virtual, for something that happens only near the very end. Summit seems to be specializing in this subgenre. Last year it produced “Ender’s Game,” a sci-fi flop devoted largely to young people training through war-game simulations. Until the climax of “Divergent,” the heroine, Tris, played by Shailene Woodley, endures the longest, toughest and most tedious basic training since Demi Moore slogged her way through “G.I. Jane.”
While the obvious takeaway from the successes of “Twilight” and “The Hunger Games” would seem to be that properties once considered the domain of teenage girls have every bit as much crossover potential as those marketed to their brothers, a number of studios have instead simply opted to stripmine serialized young-adult fiction for stories with superficially similar elements. Set in a dystopian society with a “chosen one” heroine and prominent time given over to a moony, chaste romance, “Divergent” certainly fits that bill.
The film takes place in a decaying futuristic version of Chicago, where society has reorganized itself into five distinct factions based on personality types, and named after words that “Divergent’s” target audience will soon need to learn for their SATs: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless and Erudite. (Why some factions are named with adjectives and others with nouns is a mystery that future installments will hopefully unravel.)