I quite enjoyed the first two-thirds of Divergent. At its best it was the type of high school movie—where characters worry about tests, try to make new friends, and navigate lunch table politics and crushes, all while trying to figure out what they’re good at—that doesn’t get made anymore. Now movie teenagers are always tasked with saving the world. And in the last third of Divergent that’s exactly what Beatrice (Shailene Woodley) began doing.

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All that world-building explanation in Divergent—about how the remaining society formed camps of production to keep that society going, and how members found their way to each camp by passing virtual reality tests—just went out the window. These days, you can set up a world for only so long before that world has to be saved because there’s a wall that encloses people and the military is trigger-happy.School is out forever in the Divergent series. And honestly, after all that set up, I don’t know that this world is worth saving.Tris, her lover Four (Theo James), her brother Caleb (Ansel Elgort), and her on-again-off-again nemesis Peter (Miles Teller) are hiding from the power-hungry Erudite (the intelligentsia) in Amity (which is essentially the hippie commune of the Divergent series; they farm the land, and are conscientious objectors to conflict) at the beginning of Insurgent The sequel picks up only three days after the climactic shootout and deprogramming of the Dauntless army ended Divergent. Tris is already restless. It is her destiny to restore order to mankind after all—she can’t just be content harvesting stupid grains from the stupid land.Technology seems to advance very quickly in the Divergent series. Only three days after a revolution-within-one-faction, and the Erudite already have tools that can facially recognize those who are too extraordinary to live (divergent). There's a virtual reality test that has been made to unlock an ancient oracle from the creators of this society that will explain what will happen next. For a place that has been the same for hundreds of years, there sure has been a lot of advancement in three days.A film shouldn’t be dismissed for not being what a critic wanted it to be. So my dissatisfaction with Insurgent is not that it didn’t continue to inject John Hughes-ian conflicts in an increasingly John Hughes-less world. Just that teenage fragility was the only part of the film that had any sort of enjoyable logic. The leaps and bounds of technology, and the always so serendipitous arrival and dismissal of troops for both sides, is just plain bad storytelling. For example, Tris’ main adversary, the sadistic military meathead Eric (Jai Courntey) arrives in Amity with a full squad of armed divergent extractors. Yet, his whole team leaves without him while he one-on-one takes on the only 100% divergent person that they were there to extract. It makes no sense.There’s plenty more plots and subplots in Insurgent, but you can probably guess them. The group of revolutionaries has to move to different factions where they learn new information, and get more revolutionaries on their side; big fights happen, you think a character is dead when they’re really not—but they will be revived just in time to save the day, etc.Part of the fun with Divergent was the virtual reality tests. And they also exist in Insurgent. These tests are the only part of the film worth watching—because that is the only place where the absence of storytelling logic is acceptable.A few other things that don’t make sense: Octavia Spencer and Naomi Watts showed up to work in this sequel in small, insignificant roles where they get to do nothing. They appear to not have even been directed. Kate Winslet had to reprise her role from the first film (as the Erudite leader), but whatever attracted Spencer and Watts to the sequels should’ve left their brains when Robert Schwentke (R.I.P.D.) was hired to direct not just this film, but also the next two. Handing him the keys to any franchise after R.I.P.D. is not only reckless but illogical.