Yet another ho-hum dystopic movie

Rating: 4/10 (3 November 2014)

Is it even possible in this day and age to make a dystopic science fiction film without it feeling somehow derivative of so many earlier, better works? I tend to doubt it.
Take "Divergent," a futuristic tale based on the book by Veronica Roth, itself just the first in a series of novels aimed primarily at young adults. Right off the bat, one can see that "Divergent" owes a great deal to Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," both being set in a society built on a strict caste system, where every member of the community is assigned a social level and a specialized task from which there is basically no escape. The difference is that, in Huxley's world, one is engineered from "conception" to be a member of a certain caste, while, in Roth's, individuals are, theoretically at least, free to choose, at one crucial point in their adolescence, the group to which they will forever belong.
In "Divergent," there are five categories or "factions," as they're called here, only two of which have any real significance in the film: Abnegation, whose principal function is selfless service to the community, and Dauntless, which serves, essentially, as the police force in this walled-off, post-apocalyptic version of old Chicago. Caught in the middle is a young woman named Beatrice (Shailene Woodley), who, while raised in Abnegation, finds that she may actually be what is called a "Divergent," a rare individual who fits comfortably into more than one category, making her an existential threat to the stability of this homogeneous society, where everyone knows his or her place and role. Beatrice opts to join Dauntless, a decision which leads to innumerable training sequences that seem to drag on for a minor eternity.
Par for the course for the dystopic genre, our divergent heroine soon finds herself on the run from diabolical government forces (led by Kate Winslet) bent on destroying her lest she throw a monkey wrench into their "peaceful," "well-oiled," "harmonious" society.
And that's pretty much all the movie is about. Throw in some dreamscape elements straight out of "Total Recall" and "Inception" - both much better films, by the way - and soon we find ourselves heading down the rabbit-hole into incoherence and confusion from which it becomes virtually impossible to extricate ourselves.
Even decent - if pretty much standard, at this point - production values can't rescue a generally drab film.