You will grow up and your parents will die eventually

Rating: 6/10 (13 October 2015)

The film is not at all bad, if one takes it on its own terms: a fairytale disguised as young adult movie. It has all the ingredients: a surreal environment, moralism, odd characters (puss-in-boots, seven dwarfs anyone?). The message is the same dark message found in many fairy tales: You will grow up, the world is bad, and your parents will die.
Shailene Woodley as "Tris" has to grow up fast when Kate Winslet, leader of the brainiacs in a quintipartite society that lives in the fenced-in ruins of Chicago after WW III, decides it's time for the smart guys to take over. Tris joins the "Dauntless," the solider-faction that keeps the peace among brains, public servants, growers, and truth speakers (meet the press of the future?), not counting the homeless. As a "Divergent" who embodies elements of all five factions, Tris confronts the master plan, and in the process, she must face her worst fears, find love, and see her parents die as she loses the innocence of her childhood. In this fairy tale, Tris and her Divergent boyfriend are thus the only full humans, or real people. The viewer will identify more with some factions than with others, but of course we are all divergent, and so it is easy to identify with Tris.
There are problems that keep this well-intentioned film from reaching higher. For one thing, the dystopia is so sad (like a particularly grim Brothers Grimm tale), that I would have rooted for the brains, had their plan not included killing a fifth of the population. That plan is not very brainy. Why not just inflict the mind-control potion on the public servants directly, instead of on the soldiers? No killing needed, more population to do the bidding of the brains. If I were a scientist, that's how I would have arranged things...but wait - I am a scientist!
In a fairy tale, we must not dig too deep for logic. Instead, there is a well-paced story with sympathetic lead characters, villains who are bad but convinced of their own goodness (almost always true of real political villains), and the moral pontificating is fairly minimalistic. I found it quite watchable for 2 hours and 17 minutes, although it would have been better with about 25 minutes cut out. That's true for many overly long action movies nowadays - few can hold to the line like Besson's "Taken", a 90 minute fairy tale of princess in distress rescued by the king that's a good notch above this film because it is concise.
Decently executed view-once coming-of-age story, like Hunger Games or Mazerunner.