One of the more useless trends to come around in the past few years is the “trailer for a trailer.” Trailers themselves are little teases for a film; a tease for a tease is redundant and unsatisfyingly brief. So it’s not super-surprising that the teaser for Divergent is pretty much useless. There’s so much to absorb here: multiple close-ups of Shailene Woodley, wide-eyed and vaguely upset. Someone takes an elbow to the face. Someone else gets flipped upside-down. The film’s name is mentioned, and then Woodley leaps a small gap in slow-motion. The end.
Ideally, we’d be tiny glimpses of some nifty effects or set pieces that the trailer would showcase in far grander detail, but the only thing here that raises even the slightest bit of curiosity is some guy waving around some sort of fire-whip glow stick. The full trailer for Divergent premieres at the MTV Video Music Awards this Sunday, but it seems highly unlikely that seeing more of Divergent will be stirring up any real hype.
Check it out below, and learn from Divergent’s example: this is not the way to tease a film.
Divergent is based off the YA novel of the same name by Veronica Roth, and is more or less The Hunger Games with a few slight alterations. Set in a dystopian future, all citizens are grouped into different factions based on their personalities and skill sets. Our plucky heroine, Beatrice Prior, discovers she is a “divergent” – one who can fit equally well into multiple factions. From here, she discovers a government conspiracy and works to save those being trampled on by this futuristic society, and the Hunger Games comparisons become even more blatantly obvious.
Divergent will hit theaters on March 21, 2014. It stars Woodley along with Theo James, Ray Stevenson, and Kate Winslet.
