Shailene Woodley stars in "Divergent," the film adaptation of Veronica Roth's YA novel.

When did violent dystopia become a fundamental part of young adult fiction? Part of the appeal must lie in the sensationalist escapism offered by the worlds of pieces like “The Hunger Games” and “Divergent,” where morally charged rebellion is sexy and the hot, moody boy is always interested. But the limitations of the YA and PG-13 labels too often obstruct the depth of social commentary that the genre could pose, leaving room for little more than indulgent fantasy trips like Neil Burger’s “Divergent,” a visceral and evocative but confused and shallow vision of a world that too obviously would never be a reality.

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The premise of “Divergent” is so initially nonsensical that the film seems to lose traction before the main characters are even introduced. Chicago, of all places, is the future metropolis of humanity, and the system of leadership that is never really elucidated has decided that separating its population into different factions based on personality traits is conducive to peace. The tritely reductive partitioning includes the cheerful, mindless farmers in Amity; the smart and power-hungry Erudite; Candor, who have no distinctive traits other than honesty; selfless and charitable Abnegation, who comprise the current leadership; and the attractive, strong police force of Dauntless, whose members must be brave enough to scale buildings for no reason and dye their hair.

Teenage heroine Tris (Shailene Woodley) has recently learned that she is Divergent, or, in other words, shown through a simulated test that she is simultaneously intelligent, giving, and brave. Such complexity of character is apparently both incredibly rare and a lethal threat to the government, and she is thus counseled by her sympathetic tester to hide her results and simply choose a faction. She shocks her parents when she chooses to be initiated into Dauntless, though she comes from a family of Abnegation, and is quickly started on a training montage that takes up 80 percent of the film. The remaining 20 follows the leader of Erudite (a smug and sneering Kate Winslet) as she attempts to overthrow the government by cheerily executing all of Abnegation, while Tris attempts to stop her.

Appropriately tame romantic tension is introduced in the form of Four (Theo James), Tris’s Dauntless instructor, a tattooed beauty with a dark past. As Tris hones her physical and mental strength, there is scant character development to track, as little about her pre-Dauntless self is revealed at all. Woodley carries a sympathetic but not particularly interesting character with poise, at turns a teenager out of her depth and a reluctant leader. Tris’s small group of friends playfully buoy the thematic heavy-handedness with empathy and comic relief. Although Woodley’s acting occasionally reflects her name, James maintains an intriguing simmer of tangled emotions below his attractively stoic exterior. The chemistry between the two is surprisingly palpable, even as Tris, in true YA fashion, pulls back from a kiss just when it seems tongue might make an appearance and whispers, “I don’t want to go too fast.”

The remainder of the script is similarly groan-inducing; the kiss scene is preluded by a drawn-out euphemistic exchange about whether or not Tris wants to see Four’s back tattoo. One-liners turn comic when they’re not meant to—as he and tris scale a Ferris wheel during a high-stakes game of capture the flag, Four at one point murmurs, “Everyone’s afraid of something” while the camera gazes down at his face, framed by Tris’s leathered thigh gap.

There is some merit to the unexpected rawness of the film’s staging and unapologetic physicality and emotionality; hand-to-hand combat scenes are both elegant and brutal, and the clear, sweeping divisions between factions, down to color-coded clothing, are unnerving. It is difficult not to gasp along with Woodley when she finds herself trapped in a flooding cage, or with Winslet when a knife sprouts in her outstretched hand. And though it’s predictable, towards the end of the film, that Tris will begin losing the people closest to her, Woodley’s heartbreaking meltdown is no less wrenching for it.

Those redeeming moments, however, are undone when the film yanks itself back onto its derivative premise; it’s hard to find appeal in a world where human complexity is treated as a one-in-a-million case, and it’s disappointing that the genre of YA literature has taken a turn to the convergent.

—Staff writer Natalie T. Chang can be reached at natalie.chang@thecrimson.com.