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Watch Divergent 2014 Online
Shailene Woodley (“The Spectacular Now”) plays Tris, a young woman raised in a futuristic society where its citizens are divided into five factions: Abnegation, Amity, Candor, Erudite, and Dauntless. Tested for her aptitude in each, her results come back inconclusive—“divergent,” a forbidden designation since it violates the one-quality-per-person system installed by the government. But when she’s allowed to choose which faction she wants to join, she picks Dauntless, and soon finds herself being trained by Four (Theo James) to defend society from invisible threats that lurk beyond the city walls.
Divergent – I’m sure you’ve already been told if you weren’t already a reader of the books whose covers closely resemble The Hunger Games series – is the newest Young Adult franchise. Hollywood went into a frenzy following the success of Twilight and The Hunger Games. But outside of those two series, others – like Beautiful Creatures, Vampire Academy and The Host – were assembled in chemistry-like fashion (young girl + young boy + a hint of apocalypse/mutation x prolonged sexual tension = money mountain). Those films found no audience other than the hand-wringerers waiting for this craze to die.
Thankfully, Woodley makes for more than uncertain enough of a hero to add detail and meaning to the implosion of this world. Not unlike “The Hunger Games” actress Jennifer Lawrence, there’s little artifice to her performance, and the mundane honesty of her reactions create a believability that the world would otherwise lack. As Four, meanwhile, James manages the considerable accomplishment of seeming like a real grown-up man rather than a teenage girl’s image of a dreamy boy, and he makes the character’s transformation from hardass to collaborator seem natural, if inevitable. Meanwhile, Winslet conveys one-dimensional menace in a way that is probably more attributable to the script than her skill as an actress.
Evan Daugherty and Vanessa Taylor are the credited writers on the film, and they had a fairly difficult task in trying to make this world work and feel like an actual place. Roth's novel imagined a post-Apocalyptic world where survivors created a society that has a firmly enforced caste system. By creating five different groups of people, the theory is that peace will be maintained because everything is balanced. Abnegation is for the selfless, a service caste that puts the needs of others before their own.
They're the ones charged with running society because they have no ego about their work. Amity are the farmers, putting all their effort into providing for everyone. Candor is known for their brutal and total honesty. Erudite are the intellectual elite. Finally, Dauntless exists to defend all the others, mastering their own fear so that they can be fearless in their work.