While aiming to reach the heights of Hunger Games - a young female protagonist fights against the system in a dystopian nightmare – ‘Divergent’ missed its mark, and the critics have had no mercy when illustrating the degree to which it’s done so. 

DivergentTris Prior gets checked out in Divergent... turns out, she's a divergent

The film sees Tris Prior - played by Shailene Woodley – fail to slot neatly into any of the devised factions, designed keep people in place in a dystopian Chicago. Because of this, she’s considered a ‘divergent’ and has to go into hiding, at which point she realises a conspiracy is afoot, headed by Jeanine Matthews (Kate Winslet), to KILL DIVERGANTS.

“Divergent is a clumsy, humorless and shamelessly derivative sci-fi thriller set in a generically dystopian future,” writes Lou Lumenick of The New York Post. And, possibly fearful that any further exploration of this franchise will result in certain failure, Lumenick adds: “Two sequels derived from Stephanie Roth's novels have already been announced. Hopefully, they'll have more personality than this clunker.”

“With action scenes that can't raise a pulse, an expectedly chaste romance, and plodding, formulaic expansion of its mythology, Divergent has the drab sogginess of something reheated, said Richard Lawson of Vanity Fair. “By trying to cram in as many explanatory info dumps as possible, Burger neglects to tend to the elements of the film that could easily make up for any narrative deficiencies: namely, a sense of place and a feeling of urgency,” he adds.

Check out this Divergent featurette

“By the end, you may want to hop onto one of those trains yourself and hope it arrives somewhere a lot less grim. But two sequels await. So there's always hope,” Jocelyn Noveck of the Associated Press suggested, while Las Vegas Weekly’s Josh Bell said Divergent “Throws together a lot of familiar sci-fi and coming-of-age elements, but can't make any of them connect.”

Overall: a stinker, and we can’t see the critics forgetting this one when the sequels are released. For people who like to ignore stuff like this, Divergent is out tomorrow.

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