One of the things I frequently point to when talking about movies and books is Joseph Campbell’s book Hero of a Thousand Faces. In it he makes a compelling case for what he labeled as the monomyth, a system of storytelling that is a part of narratives told all over the world. He has a lot of theories behind this system, but the general gist is that human beings just like stories told a certain way subconsciously, so that’s the way we tell stories. He argues that the monomyth has a specific pattern that’s easily interpretable, one that connects Jesus to Hercules and Bilbo Baggins to Luke Skywalker. It starts with “The Call to Adventure,” then transitions to a “Refusal of the Call,” and next is ‘Supernatural Aid.” Well, Bilbo has Gandalf and Luke has Obi-Wan. Both initially refuse until an external force intervenes and compels them to “Cross the First Threshold.” George Lucas used the monomyth to invigorate his adventure into a narrative of epic, mythic proportions, but writers today use it as a lazy tool to ensnare readers. Namely, young readers.

Harry Potter was guilty of this crime (although Rowling was a good enough writer that it didn’t much matter), so was Twilight, and now, in what might be one of the worst offenders, enter Divergent. I haven’t read the books, so I can’t comment on them, but the film gives the impression of plugging into every possible thing a young teenage girl might relate to. “Oh, the main character doesn’t fit into any of the different groups (high school cliques)!? That’s just like me!” Everyone sympathizes with an outsider. It’s the same trick as the Harry Potter sorting hat, where the fear of not belonging is exploited. This example is indicative of the whole movie: Divergent is a hodgepodge of teen exploitation. But, hey, if that’s your thing, passable moviemaking and great performances make it worthwhile.

The plot is two parts The Hunger Games and one part Ender’s Game. In a dystopian future where the world has been ravaged by war and the world’s wellbeing is enshrouded in mystery, we meet our hero to be in a rebuilding Chicago. I wonder what it is about Chicago that makes it a popular candidate as a sci-fi future, since it’s interesting that both this and I, Robot celebrated the city’s diverse architecture along with CGI additions of glass skyscrapers. The Chicago of Divergent is much bleaker than in I, Robot, however, and the city is in ruins. Wires and crude tech connect towering buildings together, probably for power. The production design is one of the film’s best features, and it was admittedly really cool to see the movie inside one of the film’s main set pieces: Navy Pier’s IMAX Theater. Only, instead of being surrounded by the shimmering (and currently very cold) Lake Michigan, the water’s been replaced by what looks like an African savanna. The setting works and helps make the movie work. The voiceover that kicks off the movie tells us Chicago’s leadership developed a system to stave off another war: they created five distinct factions that run the city. Each citizen is given a test that tells them where they should go, but they can choose whichever they like. Sort of like if you’re a nerdy kid (the faction’s equivalent is called Erudite, who have a Mark Zuckerbergian sense of superiority) you can become a jock (Dauntless). For some reason, the jocks serve as the parkour police — they climb and jump in and around countless massive objects, although this is seemingly forgotten in the film’s action scenes. To isolate and protect itself from outside threats, Chicago has a massive wall around the city. Dauntless protect that too.

We’re told this is a form of controlling the people, and by forcing everyone to conform to a specific archetype (hello Joseph Campbell!), they’ll lose the ability to be creative and diverge from everyone else. Get it? It’s the title of the movie. A divergent is someone who isn’t fit for any of the five factions. This is where we meet the main character, Tris, who is frantically told she’s a divergent as has to fit in. According to the leaders of Chicago, individuality is a recipe for disaster and it must be killed. She chooses dauntless, and as tensions between the five factions grow, it becomes her job to dissolve the situation. It’s another boring song about how being different is the path to salvation when everybody else is a mindless drone. Oh, and adults are almost always bad. We’ve seen this endless times. Hell, it’s such an overused trope that David Fincher’s seminal film Fight Club makes fun of it throughout its entire first reel. It’s for this reason The Hunger Games stands out as the Ulysses of young adult fiction. The characters are complex, defy easy explanation, and don’t submit to tropes we’ve seen a million times. In fact, The Hunger Games works as meta-fiction in how self-aware it is in avoiding the old pitfalls (at least, in the movies) of the young adult genre. That’s the irony: for all the time Divergent takes to praise independent thinking, it doesn’t have an original thought in it.