Sci-fi breakthru wannabe

Rating: 6/10 (19 August 2014)

"Divergent" strains to be the next Blade Runner or Matrix. You can see where they tried to throw in all the de rigueur elements: There's a social status quo that people accept and within which they operate. This is a little like the Matrix, except that there's (spoiler) the sense, by the story's end, that the social system in Divergent fails not because it's a systemic horror-show illusion (a la Matrix), but because the checks and balances fail; so Divergent doesn't *really* go for broke in that sense.
There's a VO backstory involving a war and the city of Chicago being surrounded by an odd sort of "wall". This comes off like a quaint throwback to Blade Runner, with it's backdrop social reality of off- planet white flight. The difference is that Blade Runner's social backdrop feels strangely warm and contiguous with our reality, whereas Divergent's feels contrived for the express purpose of explaining how the "new" Chicago's progenitors got pushed to contrive the faction system. Frankly, I prefer a backdrop that looks like a version of "home"; and that shouldn't just be another contrivance to "explain" things.
I think the flick was supposed to be an extended parable on the importance of mutation for survival. But, in the end, I wasn't convinced that it sheds light on this; it veered too far into future dystopia action hero fantasy shoot-'em-up territory. We're supposed to understand that the heroine transcends her faction. In the end, it just sorta looks like she simply lucks into the position of getting the big picture and then using her faction-developed skills to blast through and stop the malefactors.
There's a lot of stuff in the flick that doesn't seem to gel. There's an interpersonal antagonism within the heroine's caste that seems more designed to generate dramatic tension than it does to demonstrate caste- functional social behaviors; in other words, from time to time, writing for character just doesn't compute. In the end (spoiler) there's a deus ex machina moment where we're to believe a drug-programmed person is induced to snap out of it at the point where the heroine just-so-happens to need his aid to extricate her from yet-another brush with death, so she can go on to save the day.
What's good about the flick? The actors were marvelously professional, and took direction exceedingly well. Set work, effects, stunts, shots, editing, and scene-by-scene dramatic flow was managed well, in a general sense. Production work was fully what one would expect from a contemporary sci-fi action flick. Hollywood has honed that stuff down to a razor sharpness which is always a marvel to behold; and might even see you through the viewing with nary a thought to leaving the theater or ejecting the medium from your video box.
But if you're hoping to see the next mindblower sci-fi wunderkind, abandon hope.