Release Date: 03/21/2014
Beatrice Prior, a teenager with a special mind, finds her life threatened when an authoritarian leader seeks to exterminate her kind in her effort to seize control of their divided society.
Hollywood seems to have officially given up on finding the next Twilight, but they barely allowed me time to pop the cork before they moved on to their next shameless-copy target: The Hunger Games. This "young, unlikely heroine who fights the system and inevitably rises to the occasion" genre already feels stale, but that won't stop the studios from trying! Beautiful Creatures, Mortal Instruments: City of Bones (I think it's adorably optimistic that they subtitled it like it would perform well enough to get a sequel), The Host, the list goes on and on. Now we have another to add: Divergent. The pre-movie buzz on this one is actually strong enough that Hollywood might just cram enough young adult butts into theater seats to turn a profit on this one, which is frightening. They've already got a sequel in pre-production, and a third one announced (Insurgent and Allegiant; no sub-title?! Does the Writer's Guild even allow that?!) and inexplicably lured Kate Winslet to play the role of Donald Sutherland.
For the rest of the article, I'll assume you've seen The Hunger Games, because a) I'm not sure anyone hasn't, and b) I don't think you click on this article otherwise. It's another post-apocalypse with a societal structure that you better not think too long about. Questions like "How did this caste system evolve?" and "Could a society really function for longer than about 4 days structured like this?" will only serve to annoy you before the movie can do that on its own. When one of your first reactions to a trailer is "I can't wait for RiffTrax to get ahold of this," that's not a good sign, but as long as Hollywood can target a demographic that allows them to recycle ideas every five years, I wouldn't expect this trend to abate any time soon. The parallels of Hunger Games' districts to this movie's classifications, etc. are unsubtle because they don't need to be. The target audience isn't discerning enough to demand originality. About the only shift I can see from the trailer is it posing the question, "What if Liam Hemsworth's macho character had been the one fighting with Katniss instead of Peeta?" Such questions used to be the realm of fanfic, but now apparently get the full-blown movie treatment.
The best case scenario I can imagine is that there's something in the script that drew Kate Winslet to the movie; something the trailer is leaving out to simplify the concepts for its target audience. Similar to the difference in tone between Robocop's first released trailer vs. its second, maybe their will be some political or socioeconomic commentary hidden in the finished product. No movie is judged in a vacuum, however, so even if Divergent manages to hit that goal, the comparisons to Hunger Games and the number of themes lifted directly from there will keep its ceiling relatively low.
For the rest of the article, I'll assume you've seen The Hunger Games, because a) I'm not sure anyone hasn't, and b) I don't think you click on this article otherwise. It's another post-apocalypse with a societal structure that you better not think too long about. Questions like "How did this caste system evolve?" and "Could a society really function for longer than about 4 days structured like this?" will only serve to annoy you before the movie can do that on its own. When one of your first reactions to a trailer is "I can't wait for RiffTrax to get ahold of this," that's not a good sign, but as long as Hollywood can target a demographic that allows them to recycle ideas every five years, I wouldn't expect this trend to abate any time soon. The parallels of Hunger Games' districts to this movie's classifications, etc. are unsubtle because they don't need to be. The target audience isn't discerning enough to demand originality. About the only shift I can see from the trailer is it posing the question, "What if Liam Hemsworth's macho character had been the one fighting with Katniss instead of Peeta?" Such questions used to be the realm of fanfic, but now apparently get the full-blown movie treatment.
The best case scenario I can imagine is that there's something in the script that drew Kate Winslet to the movie; something the trailer is leaving out to simplify the concepts for its target audience. Similar to the difference in tone between Robocop's first released trailer vs. its second, maybe their will be some political or socioeconomic commentary hidden in the finished product. No movie is judged in a vacuum, however, so even if Divergent manages to hit that goal, the comparisons to Hunger Games and the number of themes lifted directly from there will keep its ceiling relatively low.