A riveting, deep-going satire on modern society

Rating: 9/10 (7 November 2014)

The dystopian film "Divergent" casts a critical look at industrial society and how its requirement for specialization forcibly divides people into fixed categories. One thing that's probably often overlooked is that this critique on modern society also subtly covers gender stereotypes: in a scene early in the film, people from different factions line up in queues. Almost ALL the Erudites (analytical, e.g. librarians) were men, and almost ALL the Amities (compassionate, e.g. caretakers) were women. I'm not quite sure whether or not this was part of the movie's satire on boxing people in, but I haven't found any critiques mentioning this. But what's worrying is that most viewers will probably never even notice this because it agrees so well with our spoon-fed expectations. Of course there are some biological differences between men and women, but in the movie they're portrayed as total. In reality men aren't always more analytical than women, and women aren't always more compassionate than men. If anything it's an average tendency, significant only statistically and one of the worst parts of (post)industrial society is that people are treated as masses, as statistics, and anyone who will not let the statistics apply to them is cast out.