The latest teen-girl fiction series to become a movie franchise, Divergent delivers adolescent viewers some bad news and some good news. The bad is that the dystopian future will be just like high school, with kids divided into rigid cliques. The good is that adulthood will be just like high school, so teens face no major surprises.
In the first of three movies adapted from Veronica Roth’s trilogy, Beatrice (Shailene Woodley) lives in a trashed, walled-in Chicago where everyone belongs to one of five castes: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Dauntless or Erudite. Each has a function that, when meshed together, should yield a smoothly functioning society.
Beatrice grew up in Abnegation, where rejection of self-interest means it’s the group that runs the government. But she’s about to turn 16, and so will take a test that determines which faction she’ll join for the rest of her life. The exam is future-Chicago’s SAT, in which the essay question has been replaced by a drug-induced hallucination that reveals a person’s true nature.
Beatrice’s test is administered by Tori (Maggie Q), a high-tech proctor who doubles as a tattoo artist. (It’s sort of like how barbers used to also be surgeons.) An alarmed Tori warns the girl that she has attributes of several clans, making her “Divergent.” This is as bad, apparently, as being a cheerleader and also belonging to the computer club.