Hot on the heels of
The Hunger Games trilogy, comes another teen-targeted dystopian trilogy based on books with a plucky young heroine fighting the system. Ostensibly, the setting is a utopia instead, following an unspecified (naturally; actual plausibility of background is both hard and boring to do) global apocalypse, but as sure as eggs is eggs, this will prove false. Here, the new society is divided into high-schoolish cliques of jocks as the law enforcers, geeks as the intelligentsia and several others to fill in the basic societal functions, with the set-up showing its fundamentally reactionary credentials by making the compassionate segment the polar opposite of the brainy ones. This is to say that you can either be a Democrat with feelings but no drive, or a Republican with vision but no altruism.
The young in this world are made to join one of the factions in a public ceremony upon maturity, a la Harry Potter. The heroine, who is of course secretly uncategorisable ('divergent'), which is unacceptable to the status quo but very palatable for confused teen audience identification, chooses the gung-ho one, because it is the easiest to script and allows for the maximum amount of action scenes. All this being in place, the plot then goes down the fascist coup route of least resistance and soon stops making much sense at all, the least of which is once again perpetuating the daft and frankly dangerous notion that women can be as physically hard across the board as men.
4/10
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