By now, you are either on board with Neil Burger’s upcoming adaptation of Divergent, or you’re willing to take a flier. No last-minute trailers, TV spots or posters likely are going to sway your opinion at this stage. But that doesn’t mean you can’t appreciate the gorgeous, artistic one-sheets that landed on Yahoo Movies today. The top one features Shailene Woodley as the main protagonist, Tris. The one below showcases the much-tattooed Four, played by Theo James.
If you’ve read Veronica Roth’s YA novels, which have inspired Burger’s film, you know that the tattoos Four wears on his back carry extreme significance. They are the symbols of the different factions into which members of society are divided. This is how people are classified in the dystopian future that the author writes about. And by carrying them all on his skin, Four is admitting – both publically, and to himself – that he’s tired of putting down the virtues of his rival factions, and is choosing to celebrate all of them in their own right.
Tris, meanwhile, has three ravens on her collarbone, each signifying members of her family. She’s also going to have a Dauntless tattoo on her left shoulder, and an Abnegation tattoo on her right shoulder. These will surface as the series proceeds.
But first, Divergent has to develop an audience, and that’s harder to do that one might assume. Yes, Burger and his producers would love to tap into the same audience that helped power the first Hunger Games and the four Twilight movies to international success. But for every powerful YA adaptation, there is a Mortal Instruments or a Beautiful Creatures… movies that tried to explore similar territories of fantastical forbidden love and personal struggle and failed to hit their marks. Mortal Instruments was such a flop that plans for a sequel have been shelved for the time being.
But Divergent has Woodley on its side. The young actor has proven time and again in movies like The Descendents and The Spectacular Now that she has more than enough talent to carry a feature. Can she do for Divergent what Jennifer Lawrence did for Hunger Games? We’ll know for sure when the movie opens on March 21st. Divergent co-stars Kate Winslet, Maggie Q, Jai Courtney, Miles Teller, Zoë Kravitz, Ansel Elgort, Ben Lloyd-Hughes, Ben Lamb, Christian Madsen, Amy Newbold, Ray Stevenson, Mekhi Phifer, and Tony Goldwyn. Look for most of them in the film’s most recent trailer.
