DIVERGENT

This tiresome, facile, tediously long imitation of “The Hunger Games”; the ubiquitously, depressing theme of a post- apocalyptic age, taking place in the decimated shell of the once viable city of Chicago, plummets the viewer with brutal training scenes; creating a weapon of mass destruction out of “Beatrice” a hundred- pound, determined young woman (Shailene Woodley). Handsome Theo James is her trainer “Four”.

The population is divided between 5 factions (Abnegation, Erudite, Candor, Amity and Dauntless); upon attaining majority, each individual is tested and informed of which faction they are best suited for; they still have a choice, but it comes with a price; if your selection is different from your parents; goodbye to the hearth of your birth, never to be breached again.

The conundrum lies in a preordained test; if your skills incorporate traits from all factions, you are a “Divergent”, anathema in this stymied, programmed society; a gift in bygone millenniums, now a curse to be obliterated. Beatrice (Divergent) chooses “Dauntless” and is automatically excommunicated from her family and her “G.I. Jane” phase is initiated.

For over two painful, plodding hours, the viewer suffers through a farcical, convoluted plot, focusing on the eradication of all Divergents, led by villainess “Jeanine” an “Erudite” (Kate Winslet).

William Shakespeare wrote in “Henry VI”, “first kill all the lawyers”; for years we’ve been subjected to films propagating, forecasting a dystopian, bleak world after man or nature’s  implosion; their obvious priority is to murder all the artists, architects, engineers, anyone with a creative gene in their DNA; concentrating on technocrats/scientists who excel in creeping into one’s mind, altering dreams, molding vacant, robotic tools; a world cloaked in wreckage, detritus;  lost vestiges of a time when choosing meant freedom,  not restrictiveness.

Weary of unrelenting, perpetually desolate harbinger of doom films;  calamitous , unflinching vision of the future; content to wallow in the vicissitudes of the flawed, dauntless, erudite, “candorous” blend of the twenty-first century.

2 STARS!!

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