Starring Shailene Woodley and Theo James. Rated PG. Now playing

It’s not that Divergent is too similar to the girl-meets-dystopic-world of The Hunger Games. It’s that it’s too similar to the girl-meets-her-navel world of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. Tris (Shailene Woodley) is a teenager whose sole concern for most of this movie’s long runtime is fitting in with her peers. That solipsism made for a popular young adult novel, but it’s a lousy engine to power an action movie.

Tris lives in a war-ravaged Chicago that’s divided into five personality-based factions in the hopes of keeping the peace. Her family’s faction is Abnegation, a selfless bunch that gets to rule the others: Amity (peaceniks), Candor (truth-tellers), Erudite (know-it-alls), and Dauntless (thrill-seeking warriors). As kids come of age, they’re tested to see which faction is their natural one, and then they choose the faction they’ll belong to for life. Naturally, Tris’s results are inconclusive, meaning she’s Divergent—and marked for a lonely, short, factionless existence. (It also means she’s special. Would she be worth following if she weren’t a closet superhero?)

Fortunately, Tris’s status is hushed up so she doesn’t have to deal with the consequences. Inexplicably, she betrays her parents (Ashley Judd and Tony Goldwyn) and chooses Dauntless, ‘cause they get to jump off trains and zip-line across skyscrapers while saving society from… what, exactly? There’s no looming threat. We see Tris and the other initiates train, brutally and endlessly, but we never see Dauntless protect anyone. The fight that finally breaks out among factions feels like an afterthought.

Your pleasures here, should you choose to endure the low stakes, are Woodley’s guileless performance, Kate Winslet’s honeyed villainy, and Limitless director Neil Burger’s decent rendering of this world. Theo James plays Tris’s love interest, and he’s nice to look at, if kinda personality-free. Fair warning: there are two more books in this series, and they offer diminishing returns.