Divergent (2014), PG-13, ★★

Shailene Woodley training.

As far as young adult books are concerned, any studio is craving for financial success when studio executives pitch an idea to develop a series of movies from a popular series of young adult books. Warner Bros. had a lot of successful franchises in the bag, but none as ginormous as the Harry Potter series. New Line Cinema: Lord of the Rings. Lions Gate: The Hunger Games. Summit Entertainment: The god-awful Twilight series. Now, with this franchise, Lions Gate and Summit teamed up to start a new franchise with Divergent. As far as a film series' inception is concerned compared to the other franchises, this is not a promising start.

The movie takes place in a futuristic and deserted Chicago. We see people walking around wearing identical colors matching their place of living. They are divided into five sections: the Erudite, the smartest people in dark blue clothes; the Amity, the kind and peaceful in orange and yellow; the Candor, the honest in black and white; the Dauntless, the fearless in black; and the Abegnation, the powerless where Beatrice Prior (Shailene Woodley) is placed at along with her family. They do not have a home. Beatrice's father (Tony Goldwyn) works closely with the Abegnation leader and Beatrice's mother (Ashley Judd) cares for her.

It is the day of the aptitude test to see where Beatrice and her brother, Caleb (Ansel Elgort) belong. After all the kids are tested by its history and its origins, a woman named Tori (Maggie Q) monitors Tris (Beatrice's nickname) where she gets put on a chair and has her drink a blue serum to start the test. After the bizarre test is over, she is awakened by a jolt and her results are inconclusive as she is classified still as Abegnation but also with Erudite and Dauntless. It is a rare condition and she is classified as Divergent.

The Choosing Ceremony has started and the Prior kids meet the Erudite leader, Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet). The initiating process is more grueling and stingy than imaginable: each cut their hands and put a drop of blood into a bowl to choose their factions. Tris ends up as Dauntless.

While training with the Dauntless group, she befriends Dauntless instructor, Four (Theo James), who ends up falling for him. She also meets Candor initiative, Christina (Zoe Kravitz),  Erudite initiative Will (Ben Lloyd-Hughes), Al (Christian Madsen) and Max (Mekhi Phifer). But, trouble ensues as Tris is initiated as a Dauntless member officially and tragedy strikes. But, who started this chaos in the movie?

Kate Winslet being villainous.

This movie was dull as training goes on and on. It just drags into a commercial of kids training to go to war or something. It is an advertisement. Also, nothing exciting or interesting happens in this movie which is unfortunate because the material itself looks more intelligent but it does not seem to wrap around the dire situations that the whole city is going through. It is just I Am Legend + Harry Potter + The Hunger Games but with not much adrenaline rush. It seems that the filmmakers experiment with how the story will unfold in the series. It is a struggle for most filmmakers to start something because they anticipate whether the first movie will be successful.

Shailene Woodley is a strong and solid actress who is capable of creating natural characters with realistic tension and struggles such as in her Oscar-nominated role in The Descendants and The Spectacular Now. Here, it seems like she is struggling in finding her character while not capturing the ability to become dauntless. She just becomes strong whenever the plot requires her to become strong. Also, her chemistry with Theo James has no spark. It was greatly shown with Miles Teller in The Spectacular Now. Plus, he was stiff individually. The richest performance belongs to Kate Winslet. I mean, she kind of scared me a bit with her quiet villainous looks and presence. She is terrific. The friends were sort of difficult to identify because I did not who was who or what personality he or she has.

There are moments of solid production values and good action. However, it is not presented well in terms of the story. It is edited a little bit badly. Plus, the last 20 minutes of the movie were the first minutes that created tension and I started to feel emotion towards the characters and the material. It was too little, too late, however. Divergent is a film that is monotonic in its tone, messages and story, which is unfortunate, because it surrounds a strong cast. It had the potential to become a solid first movie of a series, but, it made me accept the dystopic formula. That's not good. I hope this series continues because this is so much better than Twilight, but not up there with The Hunger Games quite yet.

**