10 Deleted Scenes That Radically Change Famous Films
6. Divergent Could've Been More Dystopian
The Maze Runner seems like the nadir of those high concept young adult novel dystopias - the sort that are all the rage now the kids have moved on from twinkly vampires to the Hunger Games - but before that, one of the strangest was Divergent. Starring Shailene Woodley and (for reasons unknown) Kate Winslet, the adaptation of Veronica Roths series of novels involves a future society where order is kept by dividing people into different factions based on their virtues. Which goes !*$% up when Woodley doesn't fit neatly into one. She diverges, see?
Why exactly such a set up requires this seeming utopia to be so brutal is one thing; another is that, to ensure that the film got a kid-friendly rating, that brutality had to be all but removed from the film. Which makes for a particularly neutered take on a violent, oppressive society, when you dont actually see any violence. Thankfully those scenes were rescued from the cutting room floor, including one particularly squirmy sequence where somebody gets stabbed in the eye. Thats, like, Nicolas Winding Refn levels of hardcore. Might've made the film worth watching.