( EW.com ) -- In the posters for `` Divergent , '' Shailene Woodley has been given the stylized bod of a comic-book sci-action vamp , and her features are as coolly chiseled as her physique . But in the movie version of Veronica Roth 's 2011 novel , Woodley , I 'm glad to say , is a lot more recognizably human , and that goes for her acting too . Her character , Tris , spends most of the film learning to leap and toss knives and risk death like a badass , and when she puts those skills to the test battling her society 's corrupt leaders , there 's no doubt that she 's a superior , market-tested YA role model , like Katniss in `` The Hunger Games . '' But she is also , as Woodley plays her , an intensely vulnerable and relatable character . Tris , a.k.a . Beatrice , has been raised as a member of Abnegation , one of five factions in a walled dystopia that was formerly Chicago and still looks , strikingly , like a semiruined concrete-playground version of that city . The members of Abnegnation dress in plain gray frocks , like the Amish , and they 're all about puritan self-sacrifice . The other four factions are Erudite ( defined by their transcendent knowledge ) , Candor ( who are compulsively honest ) , Amity ( the naturally peaceful ) , and Dauntless ( the fearless tattooed warrior jocks in black â€ ” in other words , the sect that anyone cool would want to be part of ) . Beatrice and her peers have the right to choose a -faction for themselves ( it 's like picking a college â€ ” you can go to Yale even if your folks did n't ) . But when she takes the test to learn which faction she 's best suited for , it turns out that she 's in the rare forbidden -category known as Divergent , which means she has the qualities of three factions at once : Abnegnation , -Erudite , and Dauntless . It may sound silly to say she 's an outlaw because she 's self-sacrificial , brilliant , and strong all at the same time , but what 's really forbidden is -independent thought . Woodley , through the delicate power of her acting , does something compelling : She shows you what a prickly , fearful , yet daring personality looks like when it 's nestled deep within the kind of modest , bookish girl who should n't even like gym class . Tris chooses to become part of Dauntless not because she has any special athletic skill but because it 's her nature to go for broke . The first half of `` Divergent '' is a lean , exciting basic-training thriller , with Tris willing herself to do things like jump aboard speeding trains and fight with her bare knuckles . Woodley , at every turn , lets us feel as if we 're in her shoes , not so much Dauntless as thrillingly daunted . The second half of the movie goes on a bit , with too many rote combat scenes . Yet the director , Neil Burger ( the fanciful craftsman who made `` Limitless '' and `` The Illusionist '' ) , keeps you invested , staging a rise-of-the-savior-heroine plot so that it seems less ritualistic than it does in the Hunger Games films . It helps that the drill sergeant , named Four , is played by Theo James , who 's like an unflaky James Franco with a surly hint of T-shirt-era Brando ; he brings off the neat trick of playing a hardass who is also a heartthrob . And it 's nice to watch Kate Winslet go full ice-blood fascist as the Erudite leader who makes a scarily smart case for a society rooted in the fine art of -control . In many ways , she sounds similar to a movie executive , so I 'm glad to see the launch of a dystopian franchise in which individuality , as embodied by Shailene Woodley , looks like it could mean something beyond hiply propping up the status quo . Grade : B+ . See original story at EW.com . CLICK HERE to Try 2 RISK FREE issues of Entertainment Weekly . © 2011 Entertainment Weekly and Time Inc. All rights reserved .
The film is based on a popular YA novel by Veronica Roth . Shailene Woodley in her role as ` ` intensely vulnerable '' EW gave it a grade of B+ .