'Divergent' 101: The Movie's Cast Gives Us the CliffsNotes

Wide Screen

Unlike most young adult book adaptations, "Divergent" isn't that easy to boil down to a simple logline.

It can't be described with an easy premise like "girl meets vampire" ("Twilight"), boy meets witch ("Beautiful Creatures"), or "kids forced to kill each other" ("The Hunger Games").

There is a lot going on in the high-concept "Divergent," the latest in a string of popular novels made for the big screen (and though many have failed, the highly anticipated movie adaptation is seen as having the best chance of replicating the success of "Twilight" and "The Hunger Games").

[Related: Tris vs. Katniss: An Epic Heroine Battle]

The actors of "Divergent" even have a hard time distilling its plot down to one sentence, which we found out at the movie's recent Los Angeles junket when we looked to the cast for a "CliffsNotes" version of the story. "That is tough to do," Ansel Elgort, who plays Caleb Prior, admitted to Yahoo Movies. "A lot of stuff is going on," he said. "Ums," pauses, and stalls were employed by Theo James, Ashley Judd, Miles Teller, and other cast members before they relayed single-sentence descriptions of the film.

But hey, maybe that's a good thing, right?

If you were to correctly characterize the elevator pitch for "Divergent," it would go something like this: Girl in dystopian future Chicago, divided into factions based on societal virtues, learns via a mind-reading fear test that she is an outcast, a "Divergent." But that's not all… She becomes an initiate in the city's most dangerous soldier faction, gets her butt kicked, learns there's a plot to kill her and those like her, then learns there's also a plot to kill her family's faction, becomes a better soldier, battles said assassination plots and, oh yeah, finds love with the mysterious Four along the way.

[Related: 5 Reasons 'Divergent' Is Not Just Some 'Hunger Games' Redux]

See which cast member does the best job of explaining the world of "Divergent" to the uninitiated in the entertaining video above.

You can enter the complex world of "Divergent" yourself when the movie opens in theaters Friday.

Follow me on Twitter (@meriahonfiah)

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