Divergent

I’m not sure I “got” this. As far as science fiction allegories go, this seems to be a diatribe against standardized testing and Myers-Briggs personality profiling, i.e. sorting teenagers into predestined life paths. Main teenager Beatrice gets all upset when her futuristic S.A.T. test comes up inconclusive, but why should she? She still gets to choose for herself during a weird bloodletting “choosing” ceremony. So what’s the big fucking deal? Like The Hunger Games, this futuristic society has these caste systems in place, but the only way to ideologically object or stand up to the system is to kick people’s ass. Cue the one-hour training montage wherein Beatrice learns to kick ass. Shailene Woodley does a competent job of keeping your attention while you wait for the story to start. When it finally does it’s brief and confused. There’s no decent explanation for why the “intelligentsia” caste wants to invade and/or take over the “selfless” caste. It’s probably a metaphor for something, but I’m not sure what. Anyway, there’s a lot of training and teen romance and fighting and pep talks and more training and it’s dystopia so nothing makes sense and blah, blah, blah. I hope teenagers like this and it makes a lot of money for Lionsgate. As for me, I regret to say I need my sci-fi allegories to be a little more, um, acute?