I should probably mention right away that I have not read the book-trilogy that this movie is based on. Given the content matter I might actually have liked the books. The movie? Well to me the movie was a rather mediocre one. As the blurb states the story is set in a dystopian future but we do not really get to know how they got there except the standard explanation that “there was a war”. The world is a bizarre mixture of primitive post-apocalypse living and modern, futuristic tech. The division of people into factions…well to me it felt pretty dumb to begin with and the idea that some people could not possibly fit into more than one faction was absolutely ludicrous to me. How the hell was it supposed to keep peace by deliberately factioning people against each other?
Okay, trying to get over these gripes, what about the rest of the movie. Well it was okayish I guess. It did give me the same feeling as when reading a young-adult book and I would say that this movie is most suitable for a younger audience. The story is rather predictable. There is the initial training part where Tris of course gets a few friends and in particular befriends one of her tutors. Not surprisingly there is also the obligatory jerk. The one thing that makes the movie a bit out of the ordinary are the induced dream sequences which are not too bad.
Later in the movie Tris starts to discover the plot of the bad guys and of course goes off to save the day. Again these part are simple and predictable. The ease by which Tris and a few of her friends manages to infiltrate the lab/headquarters of the baddies is rather unbelievable. It of course helps that it seems like it is only the good guys who can shoot straight or fight worth a damned with a few occasional exceptions when the script calls for it.
The movie is, as far as I understand it, based only on the first book in the trilogy so it is perhaps not very surprising that it ends with a lot of loose ends but, for Christ sake, they fight their way to stop the plot, taking down a lot of people on their way, and then they leave the chief mastermind of this despicable plot lying unconscious but alive on the floor just taking off. That just felt dumb!
It is not a bad bad movie but I do not understand the high ratings some people seem to give it.