What do you get when you put The Hunger Games and Twilight in a blender? Divergent, a generic-looking dystopian blockbuster based on author Veronica Roth's YA trilogy of the same name. Theaters in recent years have been littered with botched attempts to launch the next Twilight, from I Am Number Four to this summer's The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones. Divergent has more going for it than those failures: Star Shailene Woodley is on a hot streak after The Descendants and The Spectacular Now, and Kate Winslet is always a welcome screen presence.
The trailer is muddled, but this is the premise of Divergent as I understand it: In the futuristic version of Chicago, 16-year-olds are tested and divided into factions based on personality traits like "brave" and "selfless" and "intelligent." Our heroine Tris (Woodley) is tested, and learns — shock of all shocks — that she's a special, complex person with multiple personality traits, which makes her a Divergent. And beyond that… fight training? A flirty romance with a mysterious hunk named Four (Theo James)? Kate Winslet walking around being sinister?
In the end, Divergent may end up having the mainstream appeal of The Hunger Games, but this trailer is clearly for fans of the book series, which concluded with Allegiant earlier this year. Summit Entertainment has high hopes for the series — a sequel called Insurgent is already in development — but if Divergent is going to break into the zeitgeist alongside the series that so clearly inspired it, it should probably do a little more than present itself as a watered-down Hunger Games knock-off.
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