Divergent

Neil Burger’s 2014 film treats Chicago as a dressed real ruin rather than a digital model. Almost all of it was shot in the city, and the Navy Pier Ferris wheel was coated in dirt and rust to read as dystopian. The train jumps were staged the same way: a rooftop set built at ground level, a real carriage towed alongside it by a truck, roughly five feet of gap between them. The action is close and physical rather than large. The tension sits in the test sequences, not the fights. The fear simulations are the real set pieces, an expansion of the inside-the-head imagery Burger tried in Limitless. The longer the film runs, the more of it happens inside someone’s skull, which is a warning for anyone who came for physical conflict. The budget began at forty million dollars and rose to eighty-five once The Hunger Games succeeded; the worldwide gross came to about two hundred and eighty-nine million. Not for you if you want the story finished. The fourth film, Ascendant, was cancelled after Allegiant failed to cover its hundred-and-forty-two-million budget, and the plan to finish it as television collapsed in late 2018 when Shailene Woodley declined. This story never ends on screen.