Movie Logic - Divergent

Divergent is a terrible film in every way. Dumb story. Terrible acting. A plot that insults the viewer in the way it uses cliches and coincidence. Dull, by-the-numbers action scenes. A lead actor (Shailene Woodley, who I think was chosen because she looks like Jennifer Lawrence) who has one facial expression; a kind of pouty, vaguely sad look.

For me, the icing on this cliche cake, however, is the conclusion in which Four (Theo James) is brainwashed and told to kill Tris (Woodley). It has been established that the society of this dystopic future world can mentally condition people into becoming murderous killers and that there is no way to break the conditioning. However, after Four looks into Tris's blank, watery eyes, that somehow destroys the conditioning. Our heroes then fight off 50 million trained killers, effortlessly destroy society and ride off into the sunset...or something like that. By the time I got to the conclusion, I was bored I may have fallen asleep. Or entered an auto-hypnotic trance. One of those.

The explanation, that Four's conditioning is broken because he is afraid of looking in the face of someone he is about to kill - or some such nonsense - makes zero sense. Does that mean if I, with my fear of spiders, was subject to this conditioning, but that saw a daddy longlegs on the floor, I would snap out of it? At the same time, it is also completely predictable. We know that our Teen-Beat cover model protagonists are not going to kill each other. So, having Four stick a gun in Tris's face holds no tension. Why even bother?

It's not that I'm opposed to happy endings. I generally expect - and accept - that the protagonists will triumph. However, creating false tension this way is terrible story-telling. It is made worse when the event that defuses the tension is so idiotic.